THE  NEW  CHILDREN 


MARIA    MONTESSORI 


THE 

NEW  CHILDREN 

TALKS  WITH 
DR.  MARIA  MONTESSORI 


BY 


SHEILA  RADICE 

(MBS.  A.  BUTTON  RADICE) 


NEW  YORK 
FREDERICK  A.  STOKES  COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 


Copyright,  1920,  by 
FREDERICK  A.  STOKES  COMPANY 

All  Rights  Reserved 


IVIAIN  LIBRARY  EDUC-  DEPT- 


TO 

MY  DEAR  HUSBAND 
AND  CHILDREN 


434138 


FOREWORD 

THE  articles  on  which  this  book  is  chiefly  based 
appeared  in  The  Times  Educational  Supplement 
during  September,  October,  November  and 
December,  1919.  In  December,  before  leaving 
for  Italy,  Dr.  Montessori  wrote  the  following 
letter  to  the  Editor  of  The  Times  Educational 
Supplement,  which  is  reproduced  here  by  his 
permission : 

"Al  The  Times  Educational  Supplement,  il 
grande  giornale  che  ha  raccolto  la  mia  idea  per 
fame  una  difesa  possente  in  nome  dei  bambini, 
e  una  luminosa  illustrazione  in  nome  della  scienza, 
rivolgo  con  animo  commosso  di  gratitudine  il 
mio  cordiale  saluto  di  congedo. 

"MARIA  MONTESSORI." 


PREFACE 

IN  giving  the  following  pages  in  book  form 
to  the  public,  in  response  to  many  requests,  some 
explanation  is  needful  as  to  their  form.  When 
Dr.  Montessori  arrived  in  England  in  Septem- 
ber, 1919,  I  asked  the  permission  of  the  Editor 
of  the  Educational  Supplement  of  The  Times 
(to  whom  I  owe  thanks  for  this  and  many  other 
kindnesses,  and  for  a  great  part  of  my  own 
"continued  education")  to  seek  out  Dr.  Montes- 
sori and  to  try,  with  her  help,  to  answer  some  of 
the  queries  and  criticisms  that  assail  all  students 
of  her  work.  My  own  knowledge  of  that  work 
has  been  gained  during  the  past  six  years  by 
study  of  her  books,  by  application  of  what  I 
could  learn  of  her  methods,  by  visits  to  innumer- 
able schools,  Montessori  and  otherwise,  and 
chiefly  by  learning  from  my  own  children. 

I  think  most  of  the  criticism  is  based  on 
misconception  for  this  reason,  that  though  I  knew 
a  good  deal  about  the  method,  I  found,  after  a 
few  meetings  with  Dr.  Montessori  that  I  knew 
very  little.  What  the  world  had  to  learn  from 

DC 


x  PREFACE 

Dr.  Montessori  is  not  only  how  to  treat  little 
children  properly — it  is  a  new  philosophy  of  life. 
Of  this  philosophy  she  has  as  yet  given  her  stu- 
dents but  a  fraction,  from  which  they  are  en- 
deavoring to  build  up  the  rest  for  themselves. 

This  is  the  secret  of  the  stir  that  Dr.  Montes- 
sori has  made  throughout  the  world.  This  is  why 
she  has  disciples,  where  others  have  students  of 
their  work.  Dr.  Montessori  knows  so  much: 
knows  far  more  than  she  can  tell.  She  knows 
so  much  about  children  that  those  who  are  about 
her  are  half  afraid  lest  she  should  never  succeed 
in  saying  it  all.  This  is  why  they  hedge  her  about 
with  care;  keep  what  check  they  can  on  her  reck- 
less energy;  shield  her  from  irrelevant  criticism, 
and  husband  her  powers. 

She  is,  in  a  way,  not  very  articulate.  The 
language  difficulty  stands  between  her  and  the 
Anglo-Saxon  nations  in  a  way  that  cannot  be 
overcome  by  the  most  faithful  interpretation  of 
her  words.  What  England  and  America  need 
for  their  enlightenment,  if  they  wish  it,  is  some 
one  of  her  own  standing,  bilingual,  who  can  re- 
think her  thoughts  for  her,  as  Dr.  Wildon  Carr 
has  done  for  M.  Bergson,  in  English. 

I  think  that  probably  almost  no  one  in  Eng- 
land knows  how  unerring  is  her  sense  of  propor- 
tion, how  inexhaustible  her  sense  of  humor.  I 
think  critics  would  not  be  at  all  pleased  to  hear 


PREFACE  3d 

her  running  comments  on  what  they  write.  For 
with  all  her  tender  mercy  for  the  weakness  of 
children,  she  is  not  very  tolerant  of  the  weak- 
nesses of  the  adult ;  nor  does  she  appreciate  very 
well  that  a  priori  criticism,  which  a  section  of  the 
Anglo-Saxon  Press  indulges  in  so  freely,  "invit- 
ing correspondence":  which,  as  Mr.  Cloudesley 
Brereton  assures  me,  is  a  phenomenon  not  to  be 
found  in  a  Latin  country.  The  Latin  critic  goes 
all  the  road  with  his  subject  before  he  turns  upon 
him  to  bless  or  blast.  Even  then  the  Latin  critic 
is  constructive;  says  what  he  thinks  the  other 
person  means;  endeavors  to  present  him  whole, 
whether  for  good  or  evil;  does  not  believe  the 
province  of  criticism  to  be  the  picking  of  holes, 
the  pulling  out  of  a  feather  here  and  a  feather 
there. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  Dr.  Montessori  takes 
nearly  all  our  criticism  in  this  country  for 
granted,  because  she  has  already  met  and  an- 
swered it  in  America,  over  and  over  again.  She 
finds  practically  the  whole  of  our  infant  educa- 
tion still  enfeoffed  to  the  Teuton.  The  kindly 
thraldom  of  Froebel  still  binds  our  training- 
colleges,  and  until  that  begins  to  be  shaken  off  we 
shall  not  be  able  to  see  any  clearer  light.  Many, 
reading  Froebel's  books,  see  no  reason  why  any 
further  freedom  should  be  claimed  for  the  chil- 
dren than  this.  But  the  example  of  Germany, 


x  PREFACE 

Dr.  Montessori  is  not  only  how  to  treat  little 
children  properly — it  is  a  new  philosophy  of  life. 
Of  this  philosophy  she  has  as  yet  given  her  stu- 
dents but  a  fraction,  from  which  they  are  en- 
deavoring to  build  up  the  rest  for  themselves. 

This  is  the  secret  of  the  stir  that  Dr.  Montes- 
sori has  made  throughout  the  world.  This  is  why 
she  has  disciples,  where  others  have  students  of 
their  work.  Dr.  Montessori  knows  so  much: 
knows  far  more  than  she  can  tell.  She  knows 
so  much  about  children  that  those  who  are  about 
her  are  half  afraid  lest  she  should  never  succeed 
in  saying  it  all.  This  is  why  they  hedge  her  about 
with  care ;  keep  what  check  they  can  on  her  reck- 
less energy;  shield  her  from  irrelevant  criticism, 
and  husband  her  powers. 

She  is,  in  a  way,  not  very  articulate.  The 
language  difficulty  stands  between  her  and  the 
Anglo-Saxon  nations  in  a  way  that  cannot  be 
overcome  by  the  most  faithful  interpretation  of 
her  words.  What  England  and  America  need 
for  their  enlightenment,  if  they  wish  it,  is  some 
one  of  her  own  standing,  bilingual,  who  can  re- 
think her  thoughts  for  her,  as  Dr.  Wildon  Carr 
has  done  for  M.  Bergson,  in  English. 

I  think  that  probably  almost  no  one  in  Eng- 
land knows  how  unerring  is  her  sense  of  propor- 
tion, how  inexhaustible  her  sense  of  humor.  I 
think  critics  would  not  be  at  all  pleased  to  hear 


PREFACE  xi 

her  running  comments  on  what  they  write.  For 
with  all  her  tender  mercy  for  the  weakness  of 
children,  she  is  not  very  tolerant  of  the  weak- 
nesses of  the  adult ;  nor  does  she  appreciate  very 
well  that  a  priori  criticism,  which  a  section  of  the 
Anglo-Saxon  Press  indulges  in  so  freely,  "invit- 
ing correspondence":  which,  as  Mr.  Cloudesley 
Brereton  assures  me,  is  a  phenomenon  not  to  be 
found  in  a  Latin  country.  The  Latin  critic  goes 
all  the  road  with  his  subject  before  he  turns  upon 
him  to  bless  or  blast.  Even  then  the  Latin  critic 
is  constructive;  says  what  he  thinks  the  other 
person  means;  endeavors  to  present  him  whole, 
whether  for  good  or  evil;  does  not  believe  the 
province  of  criticism  to  be  the  picking  of  holes, 
the  pulling  out  of  a  feather  here  and  a  feather 
there. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  Dr.  Montessori  takes 
nearly  all  our  criticism  in  this  country  for 
granted,  because  she  has  already  met  and  an- 
swered it  in  America,  over  and  over  again.  She 
finds  practically  the  whole  of  our  infant  educa- 
tion still  enfeoffed  to  the  Teuton.  The  kindly 
thraldom  of  Froebel  still  binds  our  training- 
colleges,  and  until  that  begins  to  be  shaken  off  we 
shall  not  be  able  to  see  any  clearer  light.  Many, 
reading  Froebel's  books,  see  no  reason  why  any 
further  freedom  should  be  claimed  for  the  chil- 
dren than  this.  But  the  example  of  Germany, 


xii  PREFACE 

where  FroebeFs  methods  long  flourished,  and 
where  those  of  Montessori  found  little  sympathy, 
have  given  many  erstwhile  Froebelians  "furiously 
to  think." 

In  the  pages  that  follow  I  have  tried  to  sketch 
broadly  the  outline  of  what,  to  my  own  limited 
powers  of  vision,  the  Montessori  teaching  seems 
to  imply  for  the  world.  Dr.  Montessori  has  been 
most  indulgent  with  what  I  myself  feel  to  be 
an  inadequate  travesty  of  her  thought.  Her 
philosophy  is  based  on  knowledge,  where  mine  is 
largely  speculative.  The  secrets  of  not  a  few,  but 
of  thousands  of  growing  souls  have  been  open  to 
her  view,  which  was,  to  begin  with,  that  of  a 
professor  of  medicine.  Signorina  Maccheroni 
has  told  me  something  of  those  days  when  Dr. 
Montessori  practiced  as  a  doctor  in  the  Roman 
slums.  Dr.  Montessori  put  that  work  behind  her 
long  ago,  when  the  call  came  to  her  to  attack  at 
its  source  the  infinite  sufferings  of  the  repressed 
child  soul,  of  which  education  has  not  wrecked, 
for  which  medicine  and  even  the  enlightened 
medical  psychology  of  to-day  has  hitherto  been 
able  to  do  so  little.  She  speaks  so  little  of  that 
work,  that  people  are  apt  to  forget  that  she  is  a 
doctor,  one  of  that  hierarchy  to  whom  we  take 
our  children  in  the  last  resort,  trusting  blindly 
that  somehow  they  will  put  things  right.  Those 
who  have  known  one  good  doctor  respect  the 


PREFACE  xiii 

doctor's  attitude  to  life,  and  I  came  to  Dr. 
Montessori  predisposed  to  believe  in  her  by  a 
long  period  of  faith  in  the  unruffled  wisdom  of 
my  own  children's  doctor,  Dr.  Ridley  Mounsey, 
of  Camberley,  whose  views  I  am  conscious  of 
reflecting  in  much  of  what  I  have  written  here. 

Much  of  what  I  have  written  has  not  come 
direct  from  Dr.  Montessori,  although  she  has 
read  it  before  publication.  I  have  had  to  make 
up  for  lacuna?  in  my  knowledge  by  calling  in  my 
own  philosophy  of  life  to  eke  out  my  interpre- 
tation. I  have  seen  an  extraordinary  parallel, 
the  existence  of  which  has  been  confirmed  for  me 
by  Dr.  Crichton  Miller  and  others,  between  the 
work  of  Dr.  Montessori  and  the  teaching  of 
Bergson.  After  I  had  written  this  book  Dr. 
Montessori  met  Bergson,  and  marveled  greatly 
at  his  understanding  of  her  aims.  Almost  all 
that  Jung  and  the  psycho-analysts  are  finding 
out,  moreover,  at  one  end  is  corroborated  by 
Montessori  at  the  other.  These  three  living 
forces  appear  to  me  to  be  weaving  a  great  strand 
of  wisdom  which  may  help  us  away  from  that 
slough  of  Germanism  which  we  fought  the  war 
to  abolish,  out  into  a  more  rational  and  more 
Christian  way  of  life. 

I  wish  to  thank  the  proprietors  of  The  Times 
for  permission  given  me  to  reprint  that  portion 
of  this  book  which  has  already  appeared  in  The 


xiv  PREFACE 

Times  Educational  Supplement,  and  the  pro- 
prietors of  The  Anglo-Italian  Review  for  allow- 
ing me  to  quote  from  an  article  written  by  me 
for  them.  I  should  like  also  to  thank  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori's  organizer,  Mr.  C.  A.  Bang,  for  facili- 
ties given  me  to  attend  lectures. 

Those  of  my  friends  whose  words  I  have 
quoted  from  memory  will  forgive  me  if  I  have 
misrepresented  their  views  in  a  book  "strung 
together"  somewhat  hastily  in  the  intervals  of 
other  and  more  urgent  work. 

SHEILA  RADICE. 

Camberley,  Surrey. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

PREFACE         .    • ix 

I.      DR.  MONTESSORI  IN  ENGLAND   ....  1 

II.    Two  MONTESSORI  SCHOOLS       ....  12 

III.  THE  MONTESSORI  APPARATUS  ....  23 

IV.  DR.  MONTESSORI  HERSELF  .....  33 
V.    DR.  MONTESSORI  AS  A  LECTURER  ...  39 

VI.    THE  ETHICAL  BASIS 46 

VII.    THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  BASIS 51 

VIII.    WHAT  is  PSYCHOLOGY? 60 

IX.    THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  THE  NEW-BORN  .      .  67 

X.    WHAT  is  SUGGESTION? 73 

XI.    WHAT  is  Music? 81 

XII.    MONTESSORI  AND  BERGSON 92 

XIII.  TRAINING  FOR  CITIZENSHIP 100 

XIV.  TRAINING  FOR  VISION 110 

XV.    LIBERAL  EDUCATION 119 

XVI.    A  NEW  THEORY  OF  WORK 126 

XVII.    THE  EDUCATION  OF  THE  ADOLESCENT  .     .  133 

XVIII.    THE  NEW  CHILDREN 140 

XIX.    THE  ENGLISH  NURSERY  SCHOOL        .     .  148 

APPENDICES 154 

BlBLIOGHRAPHY 168 

XV 


THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

CHAPTER  I 

DR.  MONTESSORI  IN  ENGLAND 

IF  one  looks  at  any  collection  of  the  works  of 
"Great  Educators,"  or  any  history  of  education, 
the  titles  and  headings  are  all  the  names  of  men. 
Italy  has  had  the  honor  of  producing  the  first 
great  woman  to  enter  this  field.  Of  all  those 
who  went  before,  every  one  was  a  bookman,  and 
to  some  extent  a  theorist.  In  Montessori,  for 
the  first  time  in  history,  an  educator  has  come 
into  the  scholastic  world  from  another  sphere. 
For  she  is  a  doctor,  not  of  letters,  but  of  medicine, 
a  brain  specialist  and  a  child  specialist.  By  tra- 
dition neither  of  family  nor  of  profession  has 
she  any  connection  with  the  educational  world. 

When  Maria  Montessori,  as  a  little  girl  of  ten 
or  eleven,  first  felt  within  herself  the  call  to  go 
out  and  do  something  in  the  world,  there  was  in 
Italy  only  one  profession  for  which  women  could 
prepare  themselves.  But  this  girl  looked  about 
her  at  the  schoolmistresses  that  she  knew,  and 

i 


2  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

decided  definitely  that  she  would  not  be  a  school- 
mistress. That  was  a  futile,  antipathetic,  thank- 
less task.  She  decided  as  a  child  of  eleven  that 
she  must  study  engineering.  It  did  not  matter 
that  there  were  no  facilities  in  the  whole  of  Italy 
for  a  woman  to  study  engineering,  or  even  mathe- 
matics: since  she  wished  to  take  the  diploma  of 
"ingegnere,"  the  facilities  must  be  made.  So  to 
the  boys'  public  school  this  little  girl  must  go. 
One  of  her  parents  accompanied  her  to  school 
every  morning,  and  the  other,  back  from  school 
every  night.  In  class  she  sat  alone,  separated 
from  the  rest  of  the  children;  during  the  dinner 
hour  and  the  recreation  hour  she  was  shut  away 
in  a  room  by  herself,  with  a  guard  set  upon  the 
door.  She  did  not  mind,  for  her  soul  was  set 
upon  the  mastery  of  mathematics,  and  the  boys' 
school  was  the  means  to  her  end. 

Later,  as  every  one  knows,  she  decided  to  be, 
not  an  engineer,  but  a  doctor  of  medicin|,  and 
the  same  story  of  isolation  was  repeated  in  the 
medical  schools.  No  woman  had  ever  studied 
medicine  in  Italy,  and  she  was,  in  fact,  the  first 
woman  to  take  an  Italian  medical  degree.  Just 
as  she  had  sat  alone  to  study  mathematics,  so 
now  she  had  to  work  alone  for  hours  at  night  in 
the  anatomical  laboratory,  a  place  of  horror  to 
many  students  even  by  day.  The  story  of  her 
subsequent  work  at  the  University  of  Rome  and 


DR.  MONTESSORI  IN  ENGLAND  3 

at  the  orthophrenic  clinic  is  in  her  book,  The 
Montessori  Method,  and  need  not  be  repeated 
here. 

After  she  had  taken  her  medical  degree,  she 
felt  the  need  of  studying  the  problems  of  human 
existence  from  a  standpoint  other  than  the  med- 
ical, and  she  weril  back  to  the  University  and 
took  a  four-years'  course  in  philosophy.  In  those 
days,  she  has  told  me,  she  saw  the  "two  camps" 
very  plainly — the  professors  of  the  humanities 
sneering  at  science;  and  the  scientists  laughing 
at  the  philosophers,  and  she  thought  to  herself 
that  some  day  the  teacher  would  come  who  would 
unite  these  two  opposed  interpretations  of  life 
in  one.  To  what  extent  she  is  herself  that  teacher 
I  have  tried  here  to  set  forth. 

The  first  lecture  given  by  Dr.  Montessori  in 
this  country  was  delivered  before  a  crowded  audi- 
ence of  teachers  at  St.  Bride  Foundation,  Fleet 
street,  on  the  first  of  September,  1919.  The  Rev. 
Cecil  Grant,  who  was  in  the  chair,  said  that  this 
was  the  beginning  of  a  new  era  for  the  children 
of  England,  and  in  a  few  words  asked  the  bless- ' 
ing  of  God  on  the  work.  Dr.  Montessori's 
friend,  Miss  Adelia  McAlpin  Pyle,  a  young 
American,  who  has  devoted  her  life  to  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori's cause  and  has  become  to  her  as  a  daugh- 
ter, had  been  delayed  in  Spain  by  passport 
formalities,  and  the  first  few  lectures  of  the 


4  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

training  course  were  interpreted,  sentence  for 
sentence,  by  Mrs.  Lily  Hutchinson,  whom  Dr. 
Montessori  has  described  as  "the  pioneer  of  my 
English  students:  she  who,  sent  by  the  London 
County  Council  to  Rome  to  report  on  the  work 
of  the  Case  dei  Sambini,  brought  back  with  her 
that  spirit  of  well-wishing  that  enabled  the  work 
to  be  started  in  the  London  County  Council 
Schools." 

Mrs.  Hutchinson  has  spoken  to  me  of  those 
early  days,  when  the  Montessori  Method  was 
looked  on,  vaguely,  as  some  "crank"  system 
sprung  up  in  foreign  parts ;  and  has  told  me,  as 
innumerable  other  people  have  done,  how  they 
went  with  a  more  or  less  open  mind,  more  or 
less  prepared  to  condemn,  and  came  away  unable 
to  do  anything  but  bless.  Mr.  Bertram  Hawker 
was  on  his  way  to  Australia,  and,  stopping  in 
Rome  on  the  way,  was  taken  to  see  the  Case  dei 
Bambini  by  the  British  Ambassador,  Sir  Rennell 
Rodd.  He  has  often  told  how  he  missed  ship 
after  ship,  stayed  in  Rome  month  after  month, 
and  finally  did  not  go  to  Australia  at  all,  but 
came  back  to  England  to  spread  the  tidings  of 
what  Mr.  Cecil  Grant  has  called  "the  miracle 
of  the  Via  Giusti." 

The  story  of  the  rise  of  the  Montessori  Method 
has  been  told  many  times.  Dr.  Montessori  has 
described  in  her  own  books  how  she  happened 


DR.  MONTESSORI  IN  ENGLAND  5 

upon  the  secrets  of  the  springs  of  human  life: 
after  years  of  medical  practice  among  children, 
normal  and  abnormal,  years  of  university  study, 
years  of  study  of  the  development  of  human  life 
from  every  possible  standpoint,  from  that  of  the 
anthropologist,  the  physiologist,  the  psychologist, 
the  philosopher.  Dr.  Wildon  Carr  told  me  that 
he,  with  many  others,  had  shared  the  doubt  as  to 
whether  a  method  evolved  from  the  study  of 
mental  deficiency  could  be  a  legitimate  method 
to  apply  to  normal  children,  but  that  before  Dr. 
Montessori  had  got  half-way  through  the  remark- 
able lecture  that  she  gave,  with  the  aid  of  Dr. 
Crichton  Miller,  before  the  British  Psychological 
Society,  he  was  convinced.  In  the  course  of  that 
lecture  Dr.  Montessori  thanked  those  who  had 
come  to  listen  to  this  defense  or  apology  that 
she  was  about  to  give  for  her  life's  work.  Her 
first  psychological  studies  were  studies  in  psy- 
chopathology  from  the  doctor's  point  of  view. 
All  the  work  of  her  masters,  Itard  and  Seguin, 
was  directed  to  bringing  the  defectives,  the 
"extra-social"  beings,  into  society.  The  normal 
baby  is  also  in  a  sense  "extra-social,"  since  he 
has  not  yet  entered  into  the  organized  life  of  the 
community,  and  often  appears  for  a  time  to  have 
tendencies  contrary  to  that  organized  life.  Many 
of  the  methods  that  help  abnormal  beings  to 
resemble  normal  social  beings  have  helped  normal 


6  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

children  to  enter  with  greater  vigor  and  fullness 
into  social  human  life.  Many  people  dislike  this 
idea  that  proper  treatment  of  normal  children 
should  originate  in  a  study  of  abnormality.  But 
all  our  physiological  knowledge  has  come  to  us 
through  pathology,  and  the  laws  of  hygiene  have 
been  learnt  in  the  combating  of  disease. 

As  to  social  training,  Dr.  Montessori  pointed 
out  that  though  a  great  deal  has  been  talked 
about  it  in  the  schools,  almost  nothing  practical 
has  hitherto  been  done.  The  practical  exercises 
by  which  the  deficients  were  introduced  to  civil- 
ization, through  care  for  the  immediate  environ- 
ment, form  the  obvious  method  of  inculcating 
social  habits  in  all  children.  All  these  exercises 
give  order  to  the  motility — enchannel  the  dis- 
ordered activity  of  the  child.  The  old  idea  of 
the  school,  on  the  contrary,  was  to  stop  the  chil- 
dren's activity. 

Dr.  Montessori  further  described  the  phenom- 
enon of  fixation  of  attention  which  has  guided 
her  in  preparing  her  didactic  material  and  the 
conditions  of  her  schools.  "This  fixation,"  she 
said,  "is  never  presented  by  the  mentally  defec- 
tive child."  The  differential  diagnosis  is  that 
the  stimuli  only  produce  temporary  interest  in 
the  abnormal  child,  which  in  the  normal  child 
bring  about  a  lengthy  fixation.  This  power  of 
fixation  of  interest  is,  we  may  say,  the  funda- 


DR.  MONTESSORI  IN  ENGLAND  7 

mental  characteristic  of  normality.  This  is  the 
basic  phenomenon  of  the  whole  system,  and  it  is 
from  this  that  there  come  the  psychic  changes 
which  constitute  the  education  of  the  child. 

Tests  have  been  applied,  and  there  is  no  fatigue 
after  this  fixation  of  interest.  The  children  show 
a  serenity  and  satisfaction  which  is  definitely 
different  from  the  noisy  disorder  of  the  children 
in  ordinary  schools  in  the  breaks  between  work. 
The  indication  of  psychic  health  is  this  calm  joy, 
which  must  be  seen  to  be  understood.  Dr.  Kim- 
mins,  Chief  Inspector  of  Schools  under  the  Lon- 
don County  Council,  who  took  the  chair  at  that 
lecture,  said  that  he  had  made  a  careful  study 
of  the  work  of  the  "Montessori  children"  who 
had  passed  on  into  the  upper  schools,  and  had 
found  these  children  far  better  prepared  than 
those  who  had  been  taught  by  ordinary  methods. 
As  to  the  discipline  obtained  by  this  method,  any 
unbeliever  had  only  to  go  into  a  well-conducted 
Montessori  school-room.  This  was  not  in  any 
sense  the  old  discipline  imposed  by  authority: 
it  was  a  discipline  of  the  child  for  itself.  The 
example  of  Germany  had  shown  us  the  value 
of  external  discipline  in  a  most  tragic  light. 
Very  few  people  understood  the  full  meaning 
of  the  Montessori  apparatus.  The  child  loves 
the  apparatus  and  is  persistent  in  applying  it. 
Psycho-analysis  was  beginning  to  teach  us  some 


8  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

of  the  great  dangers  accompanying  our  efforts  at 
educating  children.  In  the  Montessori  method 
these  dangers  were  eliminated. 

Dr.  Percy  Nunn,  at  the  end  of  the  same 
lecture,  stood  up  and  congratulated  Dr.  Montes- 
sori on  the  masculine  logic  with  which  she  had 
stated  her  case.  Were  the  English  nation  to 
know  how  closely  in  accord  were  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori's  ideals  with  our  own  national  traditions 
it  would  be  quicker  to  take  her  methods  up.  He 
had  never  struck  so  severe  and  austere  a  dis- 
ciplinarian as  Dr.  Montessori,  who  regarded  the 
freedom  of  the  individual  as  a  means  of  obtain- 
ing that  severest  standard  of  discipline  that 
comes  from  within.  One  had  only  to  go  into 
the  class-room  of  one  of  the  L.C.C.  schools 
where  the  method  was  being  applied  to  see  what 
astonishing  powers  of  self-control  it  enabled  the 
children  to  acquire.  Happy,  quiet  activity  ruled 
in  the  Montessori  schools. 

Afterwards  Dr.  Ballard  wrote  to  me  that  the 
meeting  had  been  a  great  triumph  for  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori, who  had  produced  an  exceedingly  favor- 
able impression  upon  critics — doctors  of  medicine 
for  the  most  part,  and  university  professors  of 
psychology  and  psychopathology — by  no  means 
easy  to  please.  The  connection  between  the 
remedy  that  Dr.  Montessori  is  providing,  and 
the  unhealthy  condition  of  society  that  the  nerve- 


DR.  MONTESSORI  IN  ENGLAND  9 

specialist  is  revealing  by  means  of  psycho- 
analysis, was  made  very  clear  that  night.  Dr. 
Crichton  Miller  has  said  to  me  that  it  would  be 
worth  many  men's  time  to  devote  themselves  to 
working  out  that  connection,  with  all  that  it 
implies. 

Dr.  Montessori's  colleague,  Signorina  Anna 
Maccheroni,  made  the  same  point  in  a  letter  to 
The  Times  Educational  Supplement  of  Novem- 
ber 20: 

"The  science  of  psychology,"  she  said,  "has 
only  now  found  its  proper  orientation  and  its  true 
basis,  with  the  discovery  of  the  laws  of  liberty — 
the  distinction  between  freedom  and  disorder, 
freedom  and  abandonment,  freedom  and  indeter- 
mination.  We  are  dealing  with  a  science  in  its 
birth.  It  cannot  therefore  be  a  monopoly  of  the 
education  psychologists  of  yesterday,  unac- 
quainted with  the  new  conditions  and  facts, 
and  hampered  by  experience  of  the  old  artificial 
school  conditions  with  the  artificial  phenomena 
that  they  produced.  It  will  be  rather  a  body  of 
research  workers,  university  students,  unfettered 
by  present  educational  conditions  and  the  limita- 
tions of  a  definite  calling,  who  will  carry  on  this 
science,  cultivate  it,  possess  it,  and  make  of  it 
a  portion  of  the  general  culture  of  their  time. 
The  mind  of  the  student  is  required  for  this  work, 
free  from  professional  bias  and  capable  on  that 
account  of  envisaging  the  new. 

"Much  is  said  to-day  about  the  Montessori 


10  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

method.  It  is  looked  on  as  something  that  has 
been  done  for  little  children ;  an  apparatus  of  toys 
to  distract  the  children  and  keep  them  quiet.  Dr. 
Montessori's  books  do  not,  however,  give  this  idea 
but  rather  present  an  outline,  clear  and  precise,  of 
the  new  direction  which  psychology  must  follow  if 
it  is  to  bear  fruit.  This  new  view  of  psychology 
cannot  be  confined  forever  to  courses  of  lectures 
given  to  intending  teachers — to  audiences  of  per- 
sons already  bound  by  professional  bonds.  In 
these  courses  the  element  has  always  been  lacking 
of  students  who  can  follow  the  subject  freely. 
Just  as  children  have  suffered  for  lack  of  a 
proper  environment,  so  the  proper  environment 
of  this  new  science  is  still  lacking.  None  of  the 
courses  of  lectures  hitherto  given  by  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori  have  gone  further  than  to  give  a  certain 
familiarity  with  her  principles ;  to  lighten  in  some 
degree  the  lot  of  the  children  suffering  under  the 
old  regime;  to  create  an  enthusiasm  in  a  certain 
number  of  teachers,  and  a  desire  in  parents  for 
more  Montessori  schools  and  for  the  extension  of 
the  method  to  the  older  children.  All  this 
flowering  and  fecundity  has  not,  however,  helped 
the  new  science,  nor  its  protagonist,  who  remains 
practically  alone — alone  to  give,  alone  to  produce. 
In  some  of  the  American  universities,  where 
independent  study  and  experimentation  with 
this  subject  has  been  set  on  foot,  it  is  called  "the 
Montessorian  pedagogy,"  but  this  pedagogical 
psychology  is,  in  fact,  a  new  and  most  vital 
branch  of  human  culture.  Its  truths  cannot  be 
confined  to  teachers  alone." 


DR.  MONTESSORI  IN  ENGLAND  11 

When  Dr.  Montessori  first  left  the  practice  of 
medicine  and  went  into  the  infant  schools,  a  kind 
of  parting  salvo  of  maledictions  was  bestowed  on 
her  hy  her  professional  colleagues.  What  did 
she  imagine  she  was  going  to  achieve  by  this 
work  of  reforming  the  kindergarten?  What  a 
pity  that  such  a  brilliant  intellect  should  run  to 
waste !  The  same  attitude  towards  her  work  still 
prevents  the  world  from  seeing  its  significance 
to-day.  This  is  not  merely  a  new  way  of  amus- 
ing children — it  is  the  beginning  of  a  reorganiza- 
tion of  the  human  mind. 


CHAPTER  II 

TWO  MONTESSORI   SCHOOLS 

I  HAD  the  pleasure  of  watching  one  morning 
the  demonstration  class  which  was  formed  by 
permission  of  the  London  County  Council  in 
the  Crampton  Street  school  to  illustrate  the  prin- 
ciples which  Dr.  Montessori  was  expounding  in 
her  lectures.  The  class  had  only  been  in  exist- 
ence for  three  days,  and  the  twelve  children,  aged 
from  two  and  a  half  to  five,  of  which  it  was 
composed,  were  all  new  to  the  method  and  had 
never  seen  the  didactic  material  before.  The 
students  were  lined  up  two  deep  all  round  the 
room  (an  ordinary  medium-sized  classroom) ,  and 
Signorina  Maccheroni,  who  was  directing  the 
work,  explained  to  me  that  this  naturally  made 
the  children  a  little  quiet  and  shy. 

When  I  arrived  some  of  the  children  were 
seated  at  the  little  tables  working  with  the  but- 
toning frames  and  with  the  cylinders.  Signorina 
Maccheroni  pointed  out  to  me  the  dainty  grace 
with  which  a  little  unkempt  creature  of  two  and 
a  half,  in  an  ill-washed  frock,  yellow  hair  stand- 

12 


TWO  MONTESSORI  SCHOOLS  13 

ing  oddly  on  end,  and  a  hiatus  (presently  rem- 
edied) in  the  rear  of  her  attire,  was  handling  the 
cylinders,  and  how  if  any  one  rolled  over  on  its 
side  she  seized  it  at  once  by  the  button  and  set 
it  on  end. 

A  tiny  fellow,  sadly  myopic,  was  receiving 
initiation,  with  the  fervor  of  a  neophyte,  into 
the  art  of  washing  hands,  from  the  pouring  out 
of  the  water  to  the  final  emptying  of  the  slops 
and  wiping  of  basin  and  washstand,  each  with  its 
proper  cloth.  Other  children  who  came  to  this 
exercise  later  were  astonished  at  the  lightness  of 
the  pretty  little  basins  and  jugs.  One  little  girl 
would  not  try  to  lift  the  jug  at  all,  arguing,  I 
supposed,  mentally,  from  the  heaviness  of  all  the 
jugs  she  had  known.  One  of  the  students  was 
called  on  to  give  a  washing  lesson,  and  chose  the 
help  of  a  handsome,  rather  spoilt  little  boy,  who 
had  been  amusing  himself  earlier  in  the  morning, 
when  no  one  was  looking,  by  dusting  the  tables 
and  his  companions'  faces  in  turns.  This  little 
boy  helped  the  student  to  carry  the  washstand 
and  all  its  paraphernalia  into  the  middle  of  the 
room  and  went  through  the  mysteries  with  the 
shy  politeness  of  a  gentleman  cooperating  with  a 
lady.  At  the  end  he  ran  back  of  his  own  accord 
and  fetched  the  washstand  mat  and  put  it  back 
in  its  place. 

Sweeping  and  dusting  are  almost  always  a 


14  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

passion,  so  Signorina  Maccheroni  tells  me,  with 
the  children  of  the  poor.  Skill  may  as  well  be 
apquired  in  this  way  as  in  any  other,  and  they 
Are  allowed  to  sweep  and  dust  to  their  heart's 
content.  Confetti  are  thrown  on  the  floor  for 
them,  so  that  they  may  see  what  they  are  doing. 
The  buttoning  and  building  went  on  to  a  con- 
stant unobtrusive  accompaniment  of  dustpan  and 
broom.  The  little  squinting  boy  was  in  at  all  the 
broomings,  waiting  eagerly,  pan  and  brush  in 
hand,  to  gather  up  the  heap  of  confetti  and  run 
with  it  to  the  teacher— "Teacher!  Look!"  If 
all  the  dustpans  were  engaged,  he  was  holding 
the  teacher's  hand,  dancing  with  impatience  from 
one  foot  to  the  other,  till  his  turn  should  come 
again. 

Signorina  Maccheroni  spent  a  long  time  teach- 
ing a  child  how  to  handle  a  rug,  and  showing  it 
how  if  unrolled  carelessly,  or  dragged  about 
without  rolling  up  again,  tables  and  chairs, 
color-matchings  and  tower-buildings,  and  all  the 
work  of  the  little  school,  would  be  upset.  The 
child  afterwards  spent  a  long  time  investigating 
the  same  matter  for  itself,  and  was  able  to  find 
out  all  about  it,  since  no  one  interfered  with  him 
or  hurried  him. 

Such  are  some  of  the  "profound  problems" — 
profound  to  a  child-expert  like  Signorina  Mac- 
cheroni— in  which  the  children  in  the  Montessori 


TWO  MONTESSORI  SCHOOLS  15 

schools  engross  themselves,  oblivious  to  the 
grown-up  people  who  come  in  to  look  on. 

Another  day  I  was  with  Dr.  Montessori  at  the 
L.C.C.  elementary  school  in  Hornsey  Road, 
where  Mrs.  Hutchinson  and  her  assistants  have 
been  applying  the  Montessori  method  for  several 
years.  A  students'  demonstration  of  the  ad- 
vanced apparatus  was  being  held  in  the  infants' 
Montessori  room,  and  the  babies  were  therefore 
having  a  morning  off.  In  another  room  a  newly- 
formed  class  of  a  dozen  children,  from  seven  to 
eleven  years  of  age,  was  at  work  with  the  ad- 
vanced material. 

Dr.  Montessori,  answering  the  questions  of  a 
group  of  students,  called  on  me  to  help  her. 
What  she  wished  to  tell  them  was  this:  that  it 
is  not  necessary  for  the  teacher,  in  this  method, 
to  devise  problems  for  the  children  to  solve. 
When  they  have  grasped  the  possibilities  of  the 
apparatus  their  intelligence  should  be  allowed  to 
run  free;  the  teacher  need  not  stage-manage 
situations  to  catch  their  interests.  Afterwards 
she  turned  to  me  and  asked,  laughingly,  if  it  was 
not  remarkable  how  men  tended  to  make  diffi- 
culties for  themselves.  There  is  almost  a  suspi- 
cion of  the  Montessori  method  on  the  part  of 
teachers,  because  the  teacher's  share  in  it  is  too 
simple,  and  because  there  is  no  preparation  of 
the  next  day's  teaching,  and  no  correction  of 


la  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

what  has  gone  before.  As  Dr.  Montessori  said 
one  day  at  St.  Bride's,  school  work  should  make 
and  remake  itself  all  day  long,  like  the  waves  of 
the  sea.  A  child  playing  with  script  letters 
spells  a  word  wrong,  leaving  out,  perhaps,  the 
"i"  in  the  word  "their."  Another  child  passing 
by,  reads  out  the  mistake:  "THER!  THER!" 
Both  children  laugh,  and  the  word  is  corrected. 
The  letters  are  mixed  up,  and  the  sins  of  the 
speller  are  forgiven,  instead  of  being  saved  up  in 
an  exercise  book,  marked  with  a  bad  mark,  and 
held  in  remembrance  long  after  the  child  has 
been  spelling  "their"  correctly  for  many  weeks. 
On  the  other  hand,  child  and  teacher  must  learn 
the  habit  of  mind  commended  by  the  Stoic 
emperor,  of  the  man  who  having  done  a  good 
thing  straightway  passes  on  to  another,  not  rais- 
ing a  shout,  "like  the  vine  that  bears  cluster,  and 
having  borne  its  proper  fruit  seeks  no  further 
recompense."  There  are  waste-paper  baskets, 
but  no  samplers,  or  show  specimens  of  hand- 
writing or  brush-work,  in  the  Montessori  schools. 
This  group  of  foreign  ladies  at  home  in  a 
London  County  Council  building,  took  my  mind 
back  to  Rome  and  that  traditional  spot  between 
the  Coelian  and  the  Palatine  whence  Gregory  the 
Great,  having  seen  two  English  slave-children  in 
the  market-place,  impulsively  packed  off  a  Saint 
to  see  what  could  be  done  for  these  little  creat- 


.      TWO  MONTESSORI  SCHOOLS  17 

ures,  obviously  so  ill-used.  The  country  which 
produced  Donatello,  and  Filippino  Lippi,  and 
Gherardo  della  Notte  and  the  Delia  Robbia,  is 
giving  forth  in  this  century  a  new  and  saving 
philosophy,  based  on  the  understanding  of  the 
child.  Children  have  never  been  segregated  in 
Italy.  Boarding  schools  are  the  exception.  The 
children — less  to  their  own  good,  no  doubt,  than 
to  that  of  the  gr own-tips — are  all  over  the  place. 
The  temperamentally  neuter,  who  cannot  stand 
the  racket,  retreat  into  official  celibacy,  and  do 
not  propagate  their  kind.  Even  in  the  churches 
putti  lurk  in  every  corner,  pervade  the  heavenly 
apotheoses,  and  surreptitiously  support  the 
throne  of  God.  The  psychology  of  the  uncon- 
scious has  an  explanation  of  these  phenomena, 
but  I  think  they  show  simply  that  the  Italian 
interpretation  of  life  never  gets  very  far  away 
from  fresh  young  life  itself. 

The  conditions  of  the  average  English  ele- 
mentary school  have  no  parallel  in  Italy.  The 
prevailing  Italian  system  may  be  rigid,  and 
many  schools  backward,  but  the  model  pri- 
mary school  in  Italy  is  immeasurably  in  advance 
of  anything  here.  The  Municipality  of  Naples 
is  making  a  clean  sweep  of  the  old  system  and  re- 
establishing its  schools  on  Montessori  lines,  but 
the  reform  will  not  need  to  be  one-tenth  so  drastic 
as  a  reform  of  the  same  kind  would  have  to  be  in 


18  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

England.  The  children,  for  instance,  do  not 
come  dirty  to  school,  or  sit  in  school  with  wet 
clothes  and  muddy  boots.  There  are  baths  in 
the  elementary  schools,  and  the  children  use 
them.  "Practical  subjects"  are  absorbed  by 
Italians  with  their  mother's  milk,  and  the  needle 
or  pencil  drill,  by  word  of  command,  that  often 
passes  with  us  for  the  teaching  of  sewing  or 
drawing,  could  not  survive.  The  Italian  ideal  of 
mobility  obviates  that  inertia  of  mind  and  body 
to  which  a  vast  proportion  of  our  school  children 
succumb.  There  is  some  life,  inevitably,  both 
in  the  teaching  and  in  the  learning.  The  same 
intelligent  vigor  that  one  may  see  in  the  Montes- 
sori  children  on  the  "films"  actuates  the  laboring 
classes  of  Italy,  and  can  be  seen  any  day  in  the 
movements  of  a  Bersagliere  battalion  on  parade. 
The  fact  that  idealism  has  not  become  divorced 
from  application  is  driving  Italy  ahead  once 
more  to-day  as  in  the  days  of  Imperial  Rome. 

Dr.  Montessori  politely  says  nothing  of  what 
she  sees  in  England,  but  what  I  have  here  out- 
lined bears  on  the  suggestion,  which  is,  I  am  told, 
being  impressed  upon  some  teachers  by  their 
associations,  that  the  Montessori  system  grew  up 
as  a  reform  of  some  primitive  antiquated  educa- 
tional system  still  surviving  "in  foreign  parts." 

The  material  for  the  older  children,  as  de- 
scribed in  The  Advanced  Montessori  Method, 


TWO  MONTESSORI  SCHOOLS  19 

has  scarcely  been  obtainable  during  the  war,  and 
is  still  very  hard  to  get.  There  is  much  more  of 
this  advanced  material  than  of  the  beginning 
material,  and  it  is  finer  and  more  complicated, 
corresponding  to  the  child's  advanced  needs.  It 
calls  for  more  skillful  handling  in  use  and  more 
care  in  putting  away,  and  in  this  class  was  cer- 
tainly getting  it.  The  children  knew  what  to  do 
with  everything,  just  as  the  little  ones,  who  do 
not  attend  to  verbal  explanation,  know  what 
to  do  with  colors,  cylinders,  and  cubes.  One  boy 
of  eight  was  making  geometrical  drawings  with 
the  aid  of  a  metal  disc  and  segments,  verifying 
each  step  with  foot-rule  and  compass.  In  order 
to  fetch  each  piece  of  material  and  put  away  the 
last  he  made  a  journey  to  a  drawer  on  the  far 
side  of  the  room,  jumping  and  dancing  as  he 
went. 

A  psycho-analyst,  visiting  this  class,  would 
find  word-association  of  an  untrammeled  type 
going  on.  The  geometrical  boy,  after  filling 
his  drawing-book,  packed  everything  neatly 
away,  and  got  out  a  collection  of  nouns  and 
adjectives.  Several  other  children  came  to  help 
him,  and  there  was  some  discussion  as  to  whether 
you  could  combine  "doctor"  and  "box."  Could 
you,  for  instance,  say  "doctor  box"?  The 
teacher's  verdict  was  that  without  modification 
you  could  not,  and  "doctor"  was  then  combined 


20  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

with  a  selection  of  adjectives,  including  "good," 
"fat,"  "grumbling."  Some  of  these  were  after- 
wards taken  away  and  paired  with  other  nouns, 
but  I  did  not  see  what  finally  remained.  The 
conjunction  of  "pretty"  with  "snake"  sent  a  boy 
flying  across  the  room  to  fetch  the  teacher  for  a 
lesson  on  reptiles. 

Two  boys  seated  at  one  table  with  bead  frames 
before  them  were  engaged  in  an  animated  con- 
versation, with  gesticulation  and  grins.  I  went 
close  to  them,  but  they  did  not  take  any  notice 
of  me.  One  of  them  was  saying  to  the  other 
that  he  bet  he  could  not  add  two  million  five 
hundred  thousand  and  four  to  eight  million  six 
thousand  and  forty-seven.  Before  he  had  fin- 
ished speaking  the  other  boy  had  done  the  opera- 
tion with  the  aid  of  the  abacus  without  turning 
a  hair.  Then  they  both  wrote  down  the  result 
and  continued  the  discussion.  A  girl  was  squar- 
ing numbers  with  colored  beads  and  writing 
down  her  discoveries,  and  several  were  sitting 
about  engaged  in  "silent  reading."  The  teacher 
was  here  and  there  incessantly  in  her  capacity 
of  referee.  Dr.  Montessori  and  Signorina  Mac- 
cheroni  were  standing  in  the  middle  of  the  room 
for  some  time,  laughing  heartily  over  an  amusing 
discussion  which  they  afterwards  repeated  to  me 
with  more  amusing  additions,  but  the  children 


TWO  MONTESSORI  SCHOOLS  21 

were  not  at  all  interested  or  distracted.  This 
appeared  to  me  a  sufficient  -comment  on  the 
ritualistic,  semi-religious  interpretation  of  the 
method  that  one  sometimes  sees. 

Since  the  advanced  material  has  been  lacking, 
"Montessori  children"  have  in  most  schools  had 
to  pass  on  into  the  ordinary  classes  when  they 
have  grown  out  of  the  early  material.  Some  of 
the  children  in  Mrs.  Hutchinson's  experimental 
class  have  gone  on  without  a  break,  but  others 
have  had  a  diversion  of  several  years  to  an 
ordinary  school. 

The  work  in  the  Hornsey  Road  classes  is  good, 
but  no  class  at  present  existing  in  this  country 
can,  for  the  reasons  I  have  given  above,  be 
considered  as  typical.  Dr.  Montessori  hopes 
that  many  Montessori  schools  of  one  kind  and 
another  will  continue  to  grow  up  all  over  the 
country,  and  do  their  best  under  existing  con- 
ditions. But  teachers  will  do  harm  if  they  let 
such  schools  be  considered  as  exemplary.  Dr. 
Montessori  does  not  think  that  educators,  com- 
ing to  look  at  them,  need  be  reminded  of  a  cer- 
tain well-known  scientific  error  about  a  "missing 
link."  Scientific  monographs  were  written  about 
this  little  creature,  and  learned  controversy 
waxed  hot  over  its  remains.  Then  a  live  speci- 
men was  put  into  a  tank,  under  favorable  con- 


23  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

ditions,  and  not  only  throve,  but,  disastrously 
for  the  theorists,  began  to  grow.  The  new  ani- 
mal was  a  larva.  When  it  grew  up  it  became 
something  quite  different,  and  all  the  mono- 
graphs had  to  be  put  into  the  fire. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  MONTESSORI  APPARATUS 

SPEAKING  at  a  meeting  of  the  Montessori 
Society  at  University  College,  the  late  Dr.  Dow- 
son,  who  for  two  years  gave  such  unflagging 
support  to  the  Montessori  Society,  expressed 
his  immense  admiration  for  "that  wonderful 
Montessori  apparatus,  which  is  such  a  bugbear 
to  so  many  teachers  before  they  are  able  to  un- 
derstand it."  When  I  suggested  to  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori that  she  might  give  me  an  answer  to  the 
many  questions  that  have  been  put  to  me  about 
the  material,  she  only  laughed  and  told  me  this: 
that  one  might  also  conceive  a  system  of  violin 
instruction  in  which  it  was  not  necessary  for  the 
pupil  to  handle  the  instrument.  Does  she  in- 
sist on  the  use  of  her  standardized  apparatus? 
"Macche!  Insisteref  She  has  said  again  and 
again  that  if  she  were  Minister  of  Education  in 
any  country  she  would  never  enforce  the  use  of 
even  the  most  perfect  system  until  there  was  a 
demand  for  it.  If  teachers  want  to  get  the  same 
results  that  she  has  had,  they  will  do  as  she  has 

23 


24  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

done ;  if  they  do  not  want  to,  they  will  not.  One 
thing  she  objects  to,  and  that  is  that  teachers 
should  make  variations  on  her  method  and  ascribe 
the  results  to  her. 

Many  of  the  people  who  have  difficulty  in  ac- 
cepting the  Montessori  material  are  professors 
of  education  who  have  considered  education  in 
its  objective,  "mass,"  aspects,  to  the  forgetting 
of  their  own  nursery  days.  They  forget  the  cry 
of  the  children,  "I  wish  I  had  something  to  do!" 
They  forget  the  child's  small  radius  and  the 
child's  poverty,  and  that  it  literally  cannot,  even 
if  it  knew  how  to,  supplement  its  needs.  Even 
when  the  means  of  action  are  wrung  from  the 
grown-up,  the  story  may  be  dull ;  the  pencil  may 
be  an  HH  and  insufficiently  sharpened ;  the  scis- 
sors blunt;  the  writing-paper  thin,  with  nothing 
to  put  under  it ;  the  Chinese  white  in  the  tube  in 
the  paint-box  dried  to  a  stick,  and  the  best  colors 
all  used  up.  When  the  scullery  cat  is  going 
to  have  kittens  cook  finds  a  basket  for  it  and  a 
little  hay,  and  a  warm,  quiet,  dark  place  under 
the  stairs.  But  the  new  faculties  that  are  inces- 
santly being  born  to  every  child  in  every  family 
have  in  ninety-nine  cases  out  of  a  hundred  to 
take  their  chance  of  survival  or  starvation  in  a 
careless  world.  In  the  Montessori  schools  all 
that  has  been  changed.  The  teachers  have  ceased 
to  prance  before  their  ill-fed  battalions  and  have 


THE  MONTESSORI  APPARATUS  25 

gone  down  to  the  base  where  they  devote  them- 
selves to  keeping  the  lines  of  communication  clear 
and  pushing  up  the  advancing  army's  equipment, 
munitions,  and  supplies. 

Mrs.  Hutchinson,  in  a  lecture  to  the  Montes- 
sori  students  at  St.  Bride's,  described  several 
"explosions  into  writing"  that  she  had  "had  the 
good  fortune  to  witness."  In  the  earlier  of  these 
the  English  children  were  driven  back  on  them- 
selves and  discouraged  by  the  lack  of  properly 
differentiated  material.  A  child,  who  had  not 
written  before,  suddenly  ran  to  the  blackboard 
one  day  and  wrote  wun,  tu,  thri.  The  teacher 
took  the  chalk  and  wrote  "one."  The  child  was 
disappointed,  and  his  interest  in  writing  imme- 
diately flagged.  The  moment  for  the  "burst  into 
writing"  had  come,  and  was  lost.  But  when  the 
English  material  was  perfected,  giving  "phono- 
grams" for  the  exceptional  spellings,  the  im- 
pulses worked  themselves  out  normally,  as  in 
Italy,  though  not  so  fast.  Dr.  Montessori  asked 
her  students  the  other  day  at  St.  Bride's  what 
would  become  of  a  sudden  great  artistic  inspira- 
tion if  the  artist  had  to  prepare  all  his  material 
and  learn  all  his  technique  before  he  could  carry 
the  inspiration  out.  By  means  of  the  didactic 
material  the  mechanism  of  expression  is  prepared, 
ready  for  that  moment  when  the  child  wants  to 
express.  When  the  moment  comes  it  goes  ahead. 


26  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

The  discipline  of  the  school  is  founded  on  the 
material  and  on  the  interest  which  the  child 
takes  in  it.  When  the  attention  begins  to  fix 
itself,  new  phases  of  character  appear,  and  it  is 
this  that  makes  free  work  possible.  The  chil- 
dren who  before  would  have  disturbed  the  others 
now  "stick  to  their  job."  All  those  phenomena 
that  we  are  accustomed  to  call  silliness  and 
naughtiness  disappear.  The  child  pulls  itself 
together  and  begins  to  organize  itself.  If  teach- 
ers expect  to  bring  about  this  same  self -organiza- 
tion on  the  part  of  the  child  by  means  of  oral 
lessons  and  set  tasks,  they  will  not  succeed. 
There  are  only  two  alternatives:  either  the  pro- 
vision of  sufficient  concrete  interests  for  the  child, 
which  will  bring  about  self-discipline  through  at- 
tention, or  else  a  formal  imposed  discipline  by 
word  of  command.  For  nobody  wants  a  chaotic 
school  in  which  nothing  is  being  done,  and  the 
abstractions  which  might  suffice  to  keep  grown- 
up people  happy  and  occupied  do  not  grip  young 
children  at  all. 

I  said  to  Dr.  Montessori  that  I  had  never  seen 
a  grown-up  person  pass  by  the  "solid  insets" 
without  taking  all  the  little  graded  cylinders  and 
dropping  them  into  their  respective  holes.  "Yes, 
I  know,"  she  said,  "you  will  do  it  once,  out  of 
an  instinctive  sense  of  putting  things  in  their 
places,  but  it  will  not  fill  your  existence  from 


THE  MONTESSORI  APPARATUS          27 

horizon  to  zenith  as  it  does  that  of  the  baby." 
A  part  of  the  training  course  consists  in  the 
handling  by  the  students  of  the  "didactic  ap- 
paratus," so  that  they  may  learn  to  approxi- 
mate their  standpoint  to  that  of  the  child. 

"Do  not  imagine,"  says  Dr.  Montessori, 
"that  the  children  will  be  content  to  pass  it  over, 
as  you  would,  with  a  perfunctory  glance.  They 
verify  everything,  counting  all  the  beads  of  the 
arithmetical  material  one  by  one.  Something 
of  our  hitherto  lacking  sense  of  the  child's 
attitude  may  dawn  on  us  when  we  see  it  spend- 
ing weeks,  day  by  day,  over  an  operation  which 
we  were  used  to  dismiss,  by  the  old  method,  in  a 
quarter  of  an  hour.  By  degrees  we  may  begin 
to  realize  what  an  immense  work  is  entailed  in 
the  maturing  of  the  powers  of  calculation.  We 
should  not  want  to  count  the  'thousand  chain/ 
but  the  children  will  be  possessed  for  weeks  with 
the  craze  of  counting  it.  They  will  leave  off  to- 
day at  347  and  start  again  to-morrow — '348, 
349.'  " 

Miss  Newman,  who  studied  in  Rome  and  has 
had  much  experience  since,  has  answered  the 
question  for  me  about  home-made  material.  She 
says  that,  in  her  experience,  if  the  material  is  not 
"up  to  standard"  the  children  are  apt  to  be  put 
off  by  it  because  it  makes  the  accompanying 
problems  a  little  too  complicated  or  obscure. 
The  development  of  the  material  and  its  psycho- 


28  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

logical  bases  were  explained  by  Dr.  Montessori 
in  a  lecture  at  St.  Bride's. 

"We  have  first  of  all  to  realize,"  she  said,  "that 
the  object  which  attracts  the  child  is  not  the 
object  which  attracts  the  older  person.  Things 
are  difficult  for  us  which  are  easy  for  the  child. 
We  must  not  think  that  the  material  of  educa- 
tion will  always  consist  of  pieces  of  wood.  As 
the  mind  grows  we  need  to  multiply  the  forms 
infinitely,  till  little  by  little  the  stimuli  take  on 
the  shape  of  the  ordinary  means  of  human 
culture.  People  seem  to  be  afraid  that  the  child 
will  spend  its  whole  life  over  the  early  material. 
But  how  can  we  interest  him  if  not  on  the  basis 
of  what  he  has  already  acquired? 

"The  material  has  formed  itself,  not  arbitra- 
rily, but  according  to  the  natural  reactions  of 
the  child.  The  child's  reactions,  at  each  stage, 
have  indicated  what  new  material  was  required. 
I  have  "scrapped"  incalculable  quantities  of 
material  which  eliminated  itself  as  not  corre- 
sponding to  the  child's  needs.  How  did  I  know 
what  to  retain?  The  psychology  of  the  child 
taught  me.  La  psicologia  e  il  padrone. 

"If  this  delicate  instrument,  the  didactic 
material,  is  lacking,  the  indicative  reactions  will 
not  occur.  If  the  children  had  not  these  colors 
to  their  hand,  we  could  not  learn  about  their 
color-sense;  if  they  had  not  the  things  that 
lead  up  to  writing  and  reading,  we  could  not 
know  at  what  age  it  is  normal  to  read  and  write. 
If  he  had  not  this  simple,  accessible,  arithmetical 


THE  MONTESSORI  APPARATUS          29 

material,  we  should  never  have  suspected  the 
child  of  eight  of  being  so  passionate  an  arith- 
metician. If,  in  short,  we  did  not  give  the 
children  the  means  for  orderly  development,  that 
orderly  development  would  not  take  place,  but 
a  haphazard  growth  by  fits  and  starts. 

"It  is  difficult  to  speak  on  this  subject  without 
over-simplifying  it,  for  it  is  as  complex  as  life 
itself.  The  teacher  must  not  imagine  that  with 
each  piece  of  apparatus  she  can  press  a  button 
and  open  a  compartment  in  the  child's  mind. 
All  the  material,  and  all  the  train  of  psycho- 
logical development  which  the  use  of  each  piece 
of  material  involves,  are  connected  and  inter- 
connected. The  differentiation  of  dimensions 
may  be  the  first  thing  the  baby  reaches  out  after ; 
in  working  out  his  impulse  on  these  he  comes  to 
the  beginning  of  arithmetical  functions,  for  the 
exercise  of  which  the  material,  unknown  to  him, 
is  already  waiting.  From  the  simple  dimen- 
sional material  he  will  pass  on  in  another  direc- 
tion to  the  geometrical  material  which,  sufficient 
in  itself,  yet  prepares  the  faculties  for  writing  and 
drawing.  The  drawing  is  at  the  same  time  being 
heralded  by  the  early  discrimination  of  color. 
When  the  writing  comes  about,  so  easily  and 
naturally,  it  sums  up  in  itself  all  the  hand- 
exercises  that  the  child  has  done  with  the  rough 
and  smooth  materials,  the  dimensions,  and  the 
weights.  The  writing  eventually  branches  into 
reading  and  dramatic  interpretation,  but  dra- 
matic art  has  also  been  prepared,  by  the  gradu- 
ated ear-training  that  began  long  ago  with  the 


30  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

baby's  rattling  of  the  sound-boxes.  Each  impulse 
of  the  child  is  translated  into  action  by  means  of 
the  material,  and,  working  itself  off  in  repeated 
spontaneous  exercises,  trains  aptitudes  which 
will  combine  with  other  aptitudes  to  form  new 
activities  later  on,  till  finally  we  come  to  the 
highest  and  most  complex  human  activities — 
literature,  art,  craft,  science,  music,  dancing, 
drama.  It  is  all  a  web  of  phenomena — un  in- 
treccio  di  cose" 


Dr.  Montessori  is  often  asked  if  this  material 
is  all-sufficient  for  the  needs  of  the  growing  child. 
"No,"  she  says,  "it  is  not  sufficient.  I  have 
given  by  means  of  it  those  things  that  were  most 
difficult  to  establish.  Many  more  things  can  en- 
ter into  the  scope  of  the  child,  and  many  more 
things  should  and  must  enter."  Every  activity 
of  man  has  an  infantile  stage,  and  if  all  the 
roots  of  all  our  culture  went  back  into  babyhood 
we  and  it  would  be  far  more  perfect.  We  see 
that  this  is  so  in  the  case  of  foreign  languages, 
but  it  is  equally  true,  though  we  may  not  see  it, 
of  everything  else. 

Many  failures  to  interest  the  children  come 
from  presenting  the  material  at  the  wrong  age. 
It  is  just  as  difficult  for  the  mind  to  hark  back 
to  an  earlier  stage  as  to  strain  forward  to  one 
that  is  too  advanced.  It  is  one  of  the  basic  prin- 
ciples of  the  Montessorian  psychology  that  there 


THE  MONTESSORI  APPARATUS          31 

is  to  everything  a  season,  and  a  time  to  every  pur- 
pose under  heaven.  If  the  child  misses  the  psy- 
chological moment  for  doing  a  thing,  he  will  never 
again  be  so  interested  in  that  particular  exer- 
cise, never  sound  its  heights  and  depths,  never 
work  himself  up  to  the  perfection  in  it  that 
he  might  have  attained. 

Some  of  the  older  teachers,  set  and  formed  in 
the  Froebelian  idealistic  mold,  cannot  see  that 
there  is  in  this  material  any  "scope  for  creative 
•effort."  They  are  thinking  of  the  so-called  "free 
work"  of  the  kindergarten,  which  is  for  the  most 
part  imitative.  Scientists,  who  by  a  lifetime's 
effort  sometimes  succeed  in  adding  one  small 
stone  to  the  sum  of  an  edifice,  do  not  talk  so 
loosely  as  do  other  people  about  original  work. 
;As  for  "giving  rein  to  the  imagination,"  all  this 
sure  mastery  of  material  is  destined  to  that  and 
to  nothing  else.  It  must  not  be  thought,  how- 
ever, that  the  early  work  is  merely  preparatory. 
The  baby  is  truly  creating  when  it  forms  new 
combinations  of  the  material.  In  providing  it 
with  the  potentialities  of  combination  we  are 
not  providing  it  with  the  combinations  them- 
selves. Moreover,  it  is  only  to  us,  not  to  the 
discovering,  exploring  child,  that  these  combina- 
tions appear  predetermined.  The  angels  may 
look  upon  our  most  original  activities  in  the  same 
way  that  we  do  upon  the  child's.  "Creative  ac- 


32  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

tivity,"  says  Dr.  Montessori,  "takes  place  at 
that  point  where  consciousness  is  most  luminous 
at  the  moment." 

Above  all,  teachers  must  cure  themselves  of 
looking  down  patronizingly  on  the  child's  doings. 
Because  it  likes  things  concrete,  it  is  not  there- 
fore materialistic.  It  creates  with  simple  things 
where  we  create  with  syntheses.  In  fact,  Dr. 
Montessori  constantly  puzzles  her  students  by 
referring  to  the  child's  achievements  with  solid 
objects  as  evidence  of  spiritual  development, 
which  they  undoubtedly  are.  When  we  under- 
stand the  value  of  the  child's  work,  as  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori said  at  the  reception  given  for  her  at  St. 
George's,  Harpenden,  we  shall  be  united  with 
the  children — affratellati  con  i  bambini  come  es- 
seri  uguali  nella  creazione — cooperating  harmoni- 
ously with  the  coming  generation  for  the  progress 
of  all. 


CHAPTER  IV 

DR.  MONTESSOKI  HERSELF 

THERE  is  a  proverb  in  Dr.  Montessori's  coun- 
try to  the  effect  that  all  the  world  cannot  be  put 
into  one  basket,  and  it  has  been  too  frequently 
assumed  that  she  is  endeavoring,  in  establishing 
her  method,  to  reduce  the  whole  macrocosm  to  a 
microcosm  containing  nothing  but  the  child  and 
the  "didactic  apparatus."  No  one  can  continue 
to  nurse  such  an  absurdity  who  meets  this  clever, 
sensible  woman-doctor  and  woman  of  the  world 
face  to  face,  who  has  listened  to  her  terse  sum- 
mings-up and  trenchant  criticisms,  and  noted  her 
kindly,  sympathetic,  assured  manner  and  the  oc- 
casional deprecatingly  humorous  glance  of  her 
dark,  far-seeing  eyes.  What  she  is  aiming  at, 
in  standardizing  school  environment,  is  to  ensure 
that  education  shall  be,  to  some  degree  at  least, 
universally  effective;  that  the  development  of 
the  child  shall  be  really,  and  not  only  apparently, 
shielded  and  assisted  by  the  school,  and  no  longer 
at  the  mercy  of  local  conditions  and  of  individual 
teachers.  How  much  she  relies  on  the  influences 

33 


34.  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

of  daily  life  and  on  the  parent's  and  teacher's 
common  sense  can  be  read  in  any  of  her  published 
works,  and  seen  by  assisting  at  any  of  her  school 
inspections.  Nothing  annoys  her  more,  though 
at  the  same  time  it  sometimes  makes  her  laugh, 
than  the  unintelligent  swallowing  of  doctrine. 
Mothers  come  to  her  asking  in  all  good  faith 
whether  they  are  to  allow  their  children  liberty 
to  the  extent  of  putting  their  feet  on  the  table 
at  meals.  "Per  carita!  Get  up  at  once!"  she 
has  exclaimed  before  now  to  a  conscientious 
teacher  found  disheveled  on  the  ground  with  a 
class  of  little  Bolshevists  sitting  on  top  of  her. 
Signorina  Maccheroni  has  told  me  something 
of  Dr.  Montessori's  life  and  of  her  people.  Of 
a  good  Italian  family,  her  father  and  mother, 
"beautiful  old  people"  (cortesi,  signorili),  were 
with  her  constantly,  devoted  to  her  and  she  to 
them.  Their  interest  in  her  work  was  intense. 
"The  Casa  dei  Bambini  is  the  hub  of  the  work," 
Dr.  Montessori's  mother  constantly  reminded 
her.  "Whatever  it  develops  into,  always  let  it 
revolve  on  those  first  conditions  of  the  tenement- 
schools."  Dr.  Montessori's  mother  lived  to  see 
the  first  International  Montessori  Course  in 
Rome,  a  pilgrimage  and  concourse  from  all  parts 
of  the  earth,  with  all  the  accompaniments  of  a 
pilgrimage — faith,  fervor.  Strangers  gathered 
about  Dr.  Montessori,  hoping  for  some  lesson 


DR.  MONTESSORI  HERSELF  35 

from  her,  scarcely  as  yet  knowing  what.  Her 
house  was  at  the  service  of  multitudes — a  ffva  e 
vieni  "  all  day  long.  A  lady  from  America  once 
waited  seven  hours  to  see  her,  forgotten  by  the 
maidservant  and  waiting  on  patiently,  uncom- 
plainingly, while  the  hours  went  on  and  the  room 
grew  dark.  In  those  days  many  of  the  elemen- 
tary school  teachers  of  Italy  went  to  the  authori- 
ties and  said  that  they  could  not  go  on  teaching 
on  the  old  lines. 

I  have  also  been  told  by  more  than  one  person 
of  the  earlier  days,  when  she  was  practicing  as  a 
doctor:  of  her  extreme  thoroughness,  which  must 
eventually  in  any  case  have  made  it  impossible 
to  continue  practicing.  If  a  mortally  sick  child 
needed  to  be  given  a  bath  and  put  in  a  cjean 
bed,  Dr.  Montessori  knew  that  it  was  no  use 
prescribing  such  things  to  a  poor  mother  in  a 
Roman  slum,  but  would  send  to  her  own  house 
for  the  wherewithal  and  carry  out  the  whole 
process  herself,  trebling  the  parts  of  physician, 
nurse,  and  benefactor.  This  she  did  again  and 
again.  She  is  still  sending  "comforts"  to  old 
patients  to  whom  she  was  once  impelled  to 
prescribe  them.  If  a  patient  was  in  need  of 
work  for  his  soul's  health,  and  there  was  no 
obvious  work  that  he  could  do,  she  would  invent 
a  job  for  him  at  her  own  expense.  To  her,  to  see 
a  wrong  has  always  been  to  supply  the  remedy. 


36  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

As  with  the  children  in  her  schools,  so  with  her- 
self, impression  and  action  have  always  had  to 
combine  in  a  single  arc. 

One  can  see  from  these  indications  how  strong 
must  be  her  aversion  to  that  old  science  of  edu- 
cation which  Signorina  Maccheroni  has  called 
the  "pedagogia  delle  chiacchere"  which  philos- 
ophized much  and  did  very  little.  Herbart  and 
others  are  to  Dr.  Montessori,  "all  talk" ;  Pesta- 
lozzi  and  Froebel  are  also  mostly  theory,  though 
of  a  pleasanter  kind.  All  educators  have  always 
said  that  the  children  must  be  good,  must  be  in- 
dustrious. But  if  the  children  preferred  not  to 
be  industrious,  but  to  throw  paper  pellets  at  one 
another  or  carve  their  names  upon  their  desks, 
the  teachers  had  no  means  but  punishment  to 
make  the  children  sit  still  and  listen.  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori took  up  the  position  that  it  was  best,  be- 
fore leading  the  horse  to  the  water,  to  find  out 
what  it  was  that  the  horse  would  be  willing  to 
drink.  For  with  her  sound  practical  sense  she 
could  not  bear  a  school  where  every  one  was  get- 
ting on  every  one  else's  nerves  and  wasting  every 
one  else's  time.  "Le  povere  maestre"  she  has 
said  to  me,  ffclie  si  fanno  tisiche  per  far  i  bambini 
gobbi!"  Her  own  life  one  continuous  series  of 
achievements,  she  grieved  with  all  her  heart  for 
the  children  who  had  to  sit  still  and  be  bored. 

Professor  Foster  Watson  has  spoken  to  me  of 


DR.  MONTESSORI  HERSELF  87 

this  forced  sitting  of  the  children  in  rows  as- 
of  a  sheer  senseless  "cruelty  to  animals."  Dr. 
Montessori  is  so  sorry  for  the  children,  so  dis- 
gusted with  our  misunderstanding  of  them,  that 
she  goes  about  the  world,  spending  time  on 
propaganda  that  she  would  gladly  be  giving  to 
research.  Herself  a  worker,  she  has  found  in  the 
children  all  that  same  joy  in  work  that  she  has 
herself.  But  she  knows  also  that  for  good  work 
certain  conditions  are  necessary — sufficient  ma- 
terial; free  choice;  freedom  from  interruption; 
time  for  that  preliminary  looking  about  that  is 
a  part  of  every  cycle  of  action;  time  for  that 
quiet  satisfaction  that  follows  work  well  done; 
time  for  the  gauging  of  values  and  the  preserva- 
tion of  balance.  Froebel,  with  all  his  love  for 
children,  never  made  sufficient  provision  for  this. 
Dr.  Montessori  lives  intuitively.  I  have  heard 
her  say  that,  just  as  the  children  follow,  uncon- 
sciously, the  path  that  will  lead  them  to  speaking, 
to  writing,  to  reading,  so  she  herself  acts,  not 
knowing  whither  her  actions  tend.  Bergson's 
doctrine  of  creative  evolution  is  to  her  the  sim- 
ple, obvious  law  of  life.  When  she  has  passed 
through  a  phase  of  her  existence,  I  am  told  that 
she  puts  it  behind  her  finally,  and  passes  on  to 
the  next.  In  this  she  is  unlike  a  lady,  a  disciple 
of  Froebel,  of  whom  Dr.  Ballard  told  me,  who 
was  unable  to  accept  Dr.  Montessori's  teaching 


38  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

because  "it  would  mean  giving  up  everything 
that  she  had  said  for  the  last  thirty  years."  Dr. 
Ballard  said  to  the  lady  in  return,  as  he  has  said 
to  many  others,  that  he  did  not  think  that  that 
would  matter  at  all. 


CHAPTER  V 

DR.  MONTESSORI  AS  A  LECTURER 

MANY  foreign  speakers  complain — though 
Dr.  Montessori,  in  her  extreme  reticence,  shy- 
ness, and  modesty,  does  not — of  our  apparent 
ruminative  irresponsiveness.  When  we  go  forth 
to  sit  under  a  speaker  we  seem  to  wish  to  have 
something  to  take  away  with  us,  something  sol- 
idly doctrinal  that  we  can  quarrel  with  and  get 
our  teeth  into.  The  conditions  for  a  popular 
lecture,  always  a  thing  of  ephemeral  value,  are 
greatly  lacking  in  a  British  audience — namely, 
the  response  of  personality  to  personality,  the 
power  of  picking  up  from  momentary  sympa- 
thetic contact  with  the  teacher  some  clue  to 
the  quality  of  what  is  being  taught.  We  are 
not  very  easily  fired  by  mob  oratory,  and  that 
is  probably  a  good  thing.  But  on  the  other 
hand,  when  great  people  do  us  the  kindness  to 
come  and  speak  to  us,  we  are  apt  to  observe  a 
critical  and  grudging  reticence  till  the  fleeting 
opportunity  is  past.  We  fear  to  let  ourselves 
go,  even  for  the  moment,  and  so  we  do  not  get 


40  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

all  the  instructive  and  suggestive  things  said  to 
us  that  we  probably  should  if  we  were  more  eager 
to  receive  them.  For  it  takes  lecturer  and  audi- 
ence to  make  a  lecture,  as  it  takes  two  to  make 
a  quarrel. 

Dr.  Montessori's  first  public  meeting  in  Eng- 
land, at  the  Central  Hall,  Westminster,  was,  by 
all  ordinary  standards,  a  great  success.  A  Dutch 
gentleman  rose  at  the  end  of  it  and  begged  Dr. 
Montessori  to  remember  what  a  short  distance  it 
was  from  London  to  Amsterdam,  and  that  there 
were  thousands  of  fathers  and  mothers  and 
teachers  in  Holland  who  had  studied  her  work 
and  had  wished  for  years  to  meet  her.  The  same 
week  there  was  a  meeting  at  University  College, 
with  an  array  of  "distinguished  guests"  anxious 
to  see  Dr.  Montessori  and  through  her  own  words 
to  catch  some  light  upon  the  work.  This  was 
obviously  a  more  propitious  environment.  But 
Dr.  Montessori  is  pledged  to  many  more  public 
utterances,  and  the  thought  of  them  hangs  over 
her  like  a  cloud.  "Only  think  for  a  minute," 
she  said  to  me,  "of  the  state  of  mind  of  a  minis- 
ter of  the  Christian  religion  who  had  to  explain 
everything  in  half  an  hour  to  a  congregation  who 
knew  nothing  about  it — theology,  the  Christian 
doctrine,  the  evolution  of  religion,  the  rise  of 
Christianity,  the  history  of  the  Church.  He 
would  say,  'No,  I  will  take  one  point  and  ex- 


DR.  MONTESSORI  AS  A  LECTURER      41 

plain  that,  and  the  rest  must  be  inferred.'  But 
if  I  do  the  same  in  explaining  this  system  of 
child-psychology — which  is  new  and  implies  a 
totally  new  orientation  of  the  adult  mind — peo- 
ple who  come  to  the  one  lecture  expecting  to  be 
enlightened  will  take  the  one  point  I  have  dealt 
with  for  the  whole  of  what  I  have  to  say.  'Good 
gracious/  they  will  say,  'is  that  all  there  is  in  the 
Montessori  method?' '  What  she  said  made  me 
laugh,  because  that,  of  course,  is  exactly  what 
they  do. 

The  report  of  the  meeting  in  The  Times  oc- 
casioned, I  am  told,  a  great  deal  of  amusement. 
It  was  considered  indicative  of  something  very 
ridiculous  in  the  Montessori  method  that  the 
fastening  and  unfastening  of  one  row  of  but- 
tons a  hundred  times  over  should  be  held  to 
constitute  useful  work,  worthy  of  ranking  with 
other  serious  activities  in  the  school.  It  would 
be  a  waste  of  time  for  you  or  me  to  spend  the 
morning  buttoning.  So,  by  analogy,  it  must 
be  a  waste  of  time  for  the  three-year-old  child. 
How  the  child  is  to  acquire  the  speed  and  skill 
that  in  later  life  will  save  it  from  slatternliness 
and  unpunctuality,  except  by  devotion  of  itself 
at  some  time  to  the  mastery  of  detail,  the  critics 
do  not  suggest.  Nor  do  they  suggest  what  we 
should  give  the  school  infant  to  do  instead  of 
this  interminable  buttoning  and  unbuttoning 


42  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

which  keeps  him  happy  and  good.  His  horizon 
is  not  our  horizon,  and  at  that  stage  of  his  de- 
velopment rapid  buttoning  is  his  passion,  his 
ambition,  the  ideal  that  draws  him  on  to  some- 
thing farther,  as  Merlin  was  lured  by  the  Gleam. 
If  we  are  not  predisposed  to  see  that,  it  is  plainly 
impossible  for  Dr.  Montessori,  in  half  an  hour, 
to  enable  us  to  do  so. 

Many  teachers,  lovers,  and  students  of  child- 
hood thought  that  Dr.  Montessori  seemed  to  give 
them  no  credit  for  what  they  had  done.  I  think 
that  she  was  speaking  rather  to  the  general  pub- 
lic than  to  teachers.  The  general  public  still 
believes  in  that  kind,  steady,  resistless  Prussian- 
ism  which  keeps,  many  well-ordered  nurseries 
"up  to  the  mark."  Medical  psychology,  quite 
independently  of  Dr.  Montessori,  is  bringing 
ugly  and  unsuspected  things  that  happen  in  baby- 
hood to  light.  The  psycho-analysts,  investigat- 
ing dispassionately  and  impartially,  have  found 
that  the  living  spirit  embodied  in  little  children 
almost  never  gets  a  sporting  chance.  Excep- 
tionally strong  and  original  personalities  pull 
through  by  a  "survival  of  the  fittest."  But  the 
majority  of  human  lives  appear  a  mere  blind 
working  out  of  infantile  complexes,  a  helpless 
following  of  orientations  that  the  all-powerful, 
dominating  adults  of  our  babyhood,  sometimes 
in  love  and  sometimes  in  indifference,  create. 


DR.  MONTESSORI  AS  A  LECTURER      43 

Psycho-analysis  wrings  its  hands  over  the  things 
that  it  discovers,  but  has  not  yet  attacked  the 
cause.  "Our  knowledge  of  the  finer  mental 
processes  of  the  child,"  said  Dr.  Jung,  speaking 
in  America  in  1909,  "is  so  meager  that  ,we  are 
not  yet  in  a  position  to  say  where  the  trouble 
chiefly  lies." 

There  are  still  some  who  .think  back  to  the 
usual  upbringing  of  a  former  generation — "a 
word  and  a  blow" — and  think  it  was  good,  in 
that  it  enabled  men  to  endure  the  hardness  of 
existence.  Dr.  Montessori's  answer  on  that  point 
is  classic  by  now — that  in  order  to  combat  dis- 
ease we  do  not  inoculate  the  baby's  body  with 
all  diseases  from  the  beginning,  but  rather  nurse 
it  to  that  health  and  strength  and  perfection 
that  create  resistance.  The  hardness  of  human 
existence  is  greatly  due  to  the  prevailing  selfish 
callousness  of  the  existing  generation.  If  edu- 
cation aims  at  producing  insensibility,  who  shall 
deliver  us  from  the  body  of  this  death?  "In 
order  eventually  to  die  like  a  hero,"  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori  said  to  me  the  other  day,  "it  is  not  really 
necessary,  is  it,  to  spend  one's  whole  life  practic- 
ing death.  What  do  you  think?"  Another 
standpoint  is  that  of  the  person  who  wishes  every 
one  else  to  drink  of  the  same  cup  that  he  has 
been  made  to  drink  of.  A  fifteen-year-old  friend 
of  mine,  after  eight  years  of  reluctant  elementary 


44.  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

schooling,  says  that  "she  has  had  to  go  through 
it  and  she  doesn't  see  why  other  children  shouldn't 
do  the  same."  But  the  chief  hindrance  of  all 
is  national  and  professional  self-complacency  and 
individual  self-satisfaction.  If  we  have  gone 
through  the  mill  and  are  what  we  are,  there  is 
nothing  much  wrong  with  it. 

A  lady  of  the  great  educational  world,  who 
knows  what  Dr.  Montessori  has  at  heart  and 
knows  also  that  it  is  what  all  have  at  heart  who 
love  children,  went  to  the  Central  Hall  meeting 
and  afterwards  told  me  what  she  thought.  The 
fact  is,  she  said,  that  Dr.  Montessori  is  too  good 
ever  to  "go  down"  as  a  popular  lecturer.  She 
is  too  modest  and  reticent,  and  has  too  much 
respect  for  the  sanctity  of  her  subject.  She 
wants  to  bring  the  holiness  and  intimacy  of 
motherhood  into  school  life,  but  you  cannot  dem- 
onstrate holiness  in  a  public  lecture  hall  with 
chalk  upon  a  blackboard.  She  sees  humanity 
with  its  eyes  shut  to  the  light,  but  at  the  same 
time  she  cannot  use  those  clap-trap  methods  that 
would  make  it  jump  and  open  them.  The  under- 
standing of  what  Dr.  Montessori  has  to  say  in- 
volves a  return  to  the  same  simplicity  and  hu- 
mility that  Christ  aimed  at  when  "He  took  a 
little  child  and  set  him  in  the  midst  of  them." 
But  humanity  does  not  know  how  far  away  it  is 
from  that  ideal.  How  to  make  it  see?  Dr.  Mon- 


DR.  MONTESSORI  AS  A  LECTURER      45 

tessori  does  not  know.  It  is  a  work  of  the  con- 
science for  itself,  she  says,  an  "opera  di  virtu." 
Her  object  in  lecturing  is  to  sow  seed  here  and 
there,  but  there  is  no  key  to  her  method  except 
the  application  of  it.  "La  cosa  andra  avanti  da 
se"  In  so  far  as  it  is  founded  on  truth  it  must 
prevail. 

My  father,  who  went  with  me  once  to  see  Dr. 
Montessori,  wrote  to  me  afterwards  to  tell  her 
that  she  must  ignore  all  the  opposition.  "It  is 
the  price  of  genius — Christ  paid  it  in  cash — but 
already  He  has  received  some  two  thousand 
years  of  dividends  in  every  imaginable  currency. 
.  .  .  Let  her  take  heart  and  march  bravely  along 
the  via  crutis" 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE  ETHICAL  BASIS 

"WORDS,  words,  words!"  So  sighs  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori,  laying  down  one  or  other  of  the  innumer- 
able existing  commentaries  and  dissertations  on 
the  implications  and  tendencies  of  her  method. 

"Let  us  leave  aside,  for  the  moment,  these 
questions  of  historical  comparison  and  of  philo- 
sophical abstraction,"  she  and  her  disciples  will 
say,  again  and  again,  in  the  course  of  discussion, 
"and  let  us  get  back  to  the  living  child."  For 
the  great  point  that  Dr.  Montessori  wishes  to 
enforce  is  that  life  is  ever  new,  and  that  in  deal- 
ing with  developing  life  we  must  see  it  as  it  is, 
with  the  naked  eye,  and  not  through  the  distort- 
ing lenses  of  theory  and  preconception.  She 
will  watch  little  children's  doings  interminably 
and  listen  interminably  to  their  conversation. 
She  will  listen  to  mothers'  and  fathers'  and 
nurses'  and  teachers'  accounts  of  children's  say- 
ings and  doings.  But,  because  she  is  an  expert, 
she  does  not  want  to  hear  generalizations  about 
education.  The  trains  of  to-day  do  not  run  by 

46 


THE  ETHICAL  BASIS  47 

the  time-tables  of  last  year,  and  we  cannot  deal 
with  the  child's  difficulties  in  the  light  of  what 
former  generations  have  thought  about  them,  be- 
cause it  is  only  recently  that  any  one  has  really 
begun  to  think  about  the  child  at  all. 

Doctors  of  medicine  are  often  the  truest  re- 
specters of  children,  and  Dr.  Montessori,  it  can- 
not too  often  be  emphasized  to  those  who  distrust 
her  point  of  view,  is  both.  She  has  cared  for 
children  all  her  life,  to  the  point  of  giving  all 
her  youth  to  them.  Among  the  most  patient  of 
all  patients,  she  has  learnt,  after  many  years,  to 
know  the  child  as  it  really  is — to  appreciate  its 
helplessness  and  inarticulateness  in  the  face  of 
trouble,  its  lack  of  criteria  by  which  to  judge  the 
ills  that  are  inflicted  on  it  whether  by  man  or 
destiny,  and  its  almost  fatal  habit  of  accepting 
all  that  happens  as  its  lot.  All  teachers,  she  has 
told  me,  ought  to  gain  their  first  experience  with 
babies  or  with  abnormal  children,  because  of  the 
normal  child's  fatal  adaptability. 

The  children  had  been  taken  out  of  the  mill 
of  industry,  in  which  they  were  being  injured, 
only  to  be  put  into  the  scholastic  mill,  which  Dr. 
Montessori,  with  a  trained  physician's  eye  and 
a  great  deal  of  Latin  common  sense,  saw  to  be 
injuring  them,  both  mentally  and  physically,  al- 
most as  much.  Claparede  suggested,  a  few 
years  ago,  that  the  physicians'  rule,  "Primum 


48  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

non  nocere"  could  not  apply  to  education  be- 
cause education  was  bound  to  injure  until  a 
serum  could  be  discovered  against  fatigue. 
Somebody,  obviously,  had  to  stand  up  and  speak 
out  for  the  children,  and  Dr.  Montessori  has 
done  it.  Because  the  grown-ups  were  working 
so  hard  and  doing  it  all  so  much  "for  the  chil- 
dren's best"  it  was  hard  for  a  kindly,  sympathetic 
physician  of  bodies  and  souls,  with  a  feeling  both 
for  teachers  and  taught,  to  stand  up  and  tell  the 
teachers  that  they  were  wasting  their  time. 
Therefore  she  has  given  her  life  to  devising  a 
means  by  which  they  may  gain  their  ends  without 
harming  the  children  physically  or  mentally,  and 
it  has  proved  far  more  effective  than  she  ever, 
at  the  beginning,  guessed. 

Dr.  Montessori  is  no  sophist.  The  end  of  her 
method  is  the  same  end  that  the  teachers  were 
pursuing — the  inculcation  of  human  knowledge 
and  of  the  means  of  self-expression,  with  the 
ideal  of  a  self-respecting  and  god-fearing  life. 
"To  pass  from  social  act  to  social  act,  remember- 
ing God,"  was  an  intelligible  creed  to  Marcus 
Aurelius,  needing  no  comment  as  to  what  consti- 
tuted either  duty  or  God.  There  is  never  really 
any  doubt  about  conduct  in  the  straightforward 
world  of  kings  and  of  children.  Children  in  a 
Montessori  school  are  told:  "This  is  blue:  this 


THE  ETHICAL  BASIS  49 

is  red";  they  are  also  told,  as  occasion  crops  up, 
"This  is  right;  this  is  wrong." 

Dr.  Montessori  may  not  have  emphasized  this 
point  sufficiently  for  an  Anglo-Saxon  public. 
To  most  members  of  a  Latin  civilization  an  order 
of  things  would  be  unthinkable  in  which  the  or- 
dinary canons  of  human  behavior  were  not  a 
matter  of  course.  Certainly  few  Latin  mothers 
would  send  their  children  to  a  school  in  which 
they  were  not  going  to  be  taught  to  read,  and 
write,  and  cipher,  and  "behave  properly."  In 
her  early  writings  and  lectures  she  did  not 
emphasize  the  point  at  all,  because  it  had  never 
struck  her  for  a  moment  that  it  would  be  neces- 
sary. It  seems  curious  to  her  even  now  to  have 
to  dot  her  fs  and  cross  her  t's  upon  this  matter 
to  the  extent  that  she  has  to  do  in  any  country 
outside  of  France  and  Spain  and  Italy.  If  she 
were  less  balanced  in  herself,  and  had  less  faith 
in  the  workings  of  the  Almighty,  it  would  grieve 
her  to  see  the  lengths  to  which  enthusiasts  have 
gone,  snatching  at  her  ideas  and  neglecting  the 
lifelong,  step-by-step  investigation  and  experi- 
mentation on  which  they  are  founded.  Never 
for  a  moment  has  she  envisaged  the  taking  of 
the  growing  child  out  of  its  century,  or  the  adapt- 
ing of  it  to  any  state  of  civilization  except  that 
to  which  it  is  born.  Nor  does  she  narrow  its  en- 
vironment, except  temporarily  with  the  object 


50  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

of  eventually  broadening  it.  She  wishes  man  to 
have  everything  that  the  world  contains,  both 
spiritual  and  material,  and  the  best  of  all.  In 
her  school  at  Barcelona  she  has  specialists  from 
outside  to  teach  their  own  subjects,  playing  fields 
and  an  instructor  to  organize  the  games,  and  the 
best  singing  masters  and  dancing  masters  and 
drawing  masters  the  town  can  produce.  She  does 
not  dwell  on  these  points  in  her  lectures  because 
she  does  not  conceive  of  a  system  of  education 
without  them.  She  regulates  the  manner  in 
which  and  the  moment  at  which  they  are  taught, 
in  order  that  the  child  may  really,  and  not  only 
apparently,  have  the  benefit  of  them. 

In  the  same  way  the  child  is  introduced  to  all 
the  golden  rules  of  conduct  one  by  one.  It  is 
given  time  and  quiet  in  which  to  learn  them, 
only  that  it  may  practice  them  more  perfectly. 
Few  who  split  hairs  on  the  ethical  tendencies  of 
her  method  realize  how  simply  she  has  founded 
it  on  the  familiar  ideals  of  Latin  culture,  on  the 
Lord's  Prayer  and  the  Ten  Commandments.  A 
little  patience  is  asked  of  the  grown-ups  in  the 
beginning  in  order  that  child  and  grown-up  may 
cooperate  in  the  end. 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  BASIS 

WHEN  it  was  first  suggested  that  Dr.  Montes- 
sori  should  allow  certain  criticisms  of  her  method 
to  be  answered  in  the  Press,  the  reply  was  that 
she  did  not  usually  care  to  come  into  the  arena 
of  educational  polemics.  Educators  are  already, 
according  to  her,  far  too  much  given  over  to 
talk!  Moreover,  she  is  not  an  educator,  in  the 
empiric  sense  in  which  that  term  has  hitherto 
been  understood,  but  rather  a  scientist  who  has 
devoted  her  time  to  children.  Her  contribution 
to  science  is  an  exact  investigation  of  childhood 
and  adolescence.  Her  educational  system  has 
grown  up  by  the  way,  from  the  necessity  of  pro- 
viding an  environment  in  which  the  child  can 
be  "itself"  (and  incidentally  as  unlike  the  old 
"school-child"  as  the  public  panther  in  the  Zoo 
cage  is  unlike  the  panther  in  the  jungle). 

In  conversation  with  Dr.  Montessori  I  put  the 
question  to  her,  which  had  been  put,  with  others, 
before  me,  whether  her  method  tended  to  bring 
about  an  abnormal  and  possibly  harmful  pre- 
51 


52  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

cocity,  as  evidenced  by  the  early  "explosion" 
into  reading  and  writing  of  the  children  in  the 
Montessori  schools.  What  I  have  written  here 
is  a  summary  of  the  conversation  that  followed 
and  includes  the  gist  of  what  was  said  on  both 
sides. 

"Your  correspondent  is  not  a  doctor,"  Dr. 
Montessori  said.  "In  practice  we  do  not  find 
that  this  happens,  and  in  experimental  science, 
as  you  know,  we  do  not  work  by  logic  but  by 
experiment.  Children,"  she  continued,  "as  a 
matter  of  actual  experience  are  not  susceptible 
to  mental  intoxication  in  the  way  that  your  cor- 
respondent has  suggested.  If  given  unsuitable 
food,  a  normal  child  will  be  sick.  If  given  too 
much  of  such  interests  and  amusements  as  please 
adults  (and  this  is  constantly  happening  to 
nearly  all  the  children  in  the  world),  the  child 
tends  first  to  become  irritable  and  inattentive, 
and  then  to  go  to  sleep.  Life  has  far  more  power 
of  safeguarding  its  own  development  than  the 
average  person  is  apt  to  believe." 

"Is  it  not  possible,  then,  to  injure  the  child  by 
our  treatment  of  it?"  "Yes.  Work  without  in- 
terest— forced  labor — is  extremely  exhausting, 
and  so  is  idleness.  Either  of  these  conditions 
creates  a  state  of  boredom,  and  boredom  is  physi- 
ologically identical  with  exhaustion.  In  Italy, 
where  there  is  no  capital  punishment,  criminals 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  BASIS  53 

condemned  to  solitary  confinement  without  oc- 
cupation show  the  physiological  signs  of  ex- 
treme fatigue.  Although  sufficiently  fed  and 
kept  in  what  might  be  thought  a  state  of  perfect 
rest,  they  become  exhausted  and  emaciated." 

The  children  in  the  Montessori  schools,  it  must 
be  remembered,  do  not  have  stimuli  purposefully 
and  arbitrarily  applied  to  them,  as  is  the  case 
under  any  other  method  of  education,  and  in  the 
elementary  schools  in  most  countries  from  the 
age  of  five  years  on.  We  cannot  go  into  any 
elementary  school  or  kindergarten  where  the 
whole  force  of  the  school  machinery  is  not  be- 
ing devoted  to  stimulation  of  young  children. 
"Look!"  "Listen!"  "Wake  "up!"  "Bustle 
up!"  Books,  pictures,  demonstration,  instruc- 
tion, are  poured  in  on  the  child  in  an  incessant 
stream  for  hours  upon  hours.  This  is  all  stimu- 
lation. If  educators  approve  of  it  the  inference 
is  that  they  know  very  well  that  the  child  will 
not  be  crammed,  be  bustled;  that  the  meshes 
are  so  large  that  the  child  slips  through.  But 
if  this  is  the  case,  the  teacher  is  wasting  his 
time.  "The  mysterious  and  magnetic  objects," 
Dr.  Montessori  said,  "with  which  people  accuse 
me  of  hypnotizing  the  children  are  all  in  the  cup- 
board, and  if  a  child  wants  one  he  has  to  go  and 
get  it  for  himself."  If,  on  the  other  hand,  the 
children  do  not  want  to  work,  but  only  to  look 


54.  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

on,  or  to  meditate,  or  to  gaze  out  of  the  window, 
or  lie  down,  or  swing  on  the  parallel  bars,  they 
are  perfectly  free  to  do  so.  Since  they  return 
to  work  sooner  or  later,  without  pressure,  the 
aim  of  the  school  is  eventually  attained.  If  it  is 
not  to  be  attained,  why  have  any  schools?  But 
no  one  forces  the  child  to  work. 

At  the  end  of  a  year  of  school  work  in  Rome 
some  of  the  recognized  fatigue-tests  were  applied 
by  a  number  of  outside  specialists  who  asked  to 
be  allowed  to  do  so.  Dr.  Montessori  has  no  very 
great  faith  in  psychological  tests,  but  she  was 
glad  to  hear  what  was  already  obvious  to  her, 
that  there  was  no  evidence  of  fatigue.  She  de- 
duces from  this  and  much  other  evidence  a  fact 
which  she  considers  to  be  of  incalculable  social 
importance,  as  indicating  the  eventual  solution 
of  the  problems  of  labor — that  work,  spontane- 
ously chosen  and  rightly  undertaken,  does  not 
tire.  Rest,  both  mental  and  physical,  appears 
to  consist  not  in  inaction  but  in  work  plus  inter- 
est. In  establishing  this  principle  for  children 
she  has,  one  may  notice,  helped  to  put  on  a  scien- 
tific basis  a  rule  of  thumb  which  has  been  success- 
fully applied  by  "mind-healers"  in  all  ages,  and 
the  promulgators  of  many  popular  methods  of 
self-education  and  self-help.  It  has  been  estab- 
lished beyond  a  doubt  by  medical  investigators  in 
this  country  of  the  phenomena  of  industrial 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  BASIS  55 

fatigue.  NOT  does  there  seem  to  be  ground  for 
thinking  that  work  which  does  not  tire  the  chil- 
dren at  the  time  can  have  any  deleterious  effect 
upon  them  in  their  future  lives.  Not  from  such 
causes  do  neurotic  complexes — the  bruises  and 
cicatrices  of  the  mentality — spring. 

Rather  than  overdo  the  child  in  the  matter  of 
stimulation,  Dr.  Montessori  has  aimed  at  simpli- 
fying its  environment  by  analyzing  the  great 
mass  of  stimuli,  with  which  the  child  in  daily 
life  is  constantly  surrounded,  into  its  component 
parts.  An  intelligent  child  is  constantly  intel- 
lectually stimulated  by  everything  that  it  sees, 
and  touches,  and  hears,  and  tastes,  and  smells. 
The  day  of  the  little  slum  child  is  a  kaleidoscopic 
jumble  of  stimuli  from  morning  till  night.  If 
the  simple  geometrical  figures  that  are  given  the 
baby  to  play  with  are  not  good  for  it,  how  shall 
we  frame  an  environment  for  the  child  in  which 
there  will  be  no  geometric  forms  to  interest  him? 
The  window  he  looks  out  of  is  a  rectangle,  the 
plate  he  eats  off  is  a  circle.  The  father  is  trying 
to  write,  and  the  child  plays  about  him,  meddling 
with  the  round  inkwell,  the  rectangular  paper- 
weight, and  the  rectangular  writing-pad.  Life 
is  a  tussle  between  the  baby  and  its  parents  for 
objects  for  which  they  both  have  uses,  and  which 
it  is  impossible  for  both  to  use  at  the  same  time. 
The  child  is  starving  for  shapes  and  sizes  to 


56  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

handle,  and  why,  Dr.  Montessori  thinks,  should 
we  not  provide  him  with  them,  instead  of  driving 
him  to  grab  them  for  himself?  The  didactic 
cylinder  is  merely  a  more  convenient  form  of 
stimulus  than  the  inkwell.  A  lady  who  wrote  to 
us  on  this  point  showed  some  lack  of  "imagina- 
tion." "Would  not  the  inkwell,"  she  said  (I 
quote  from  memory),  "be  a  better  stimulus,  as 
something  that  father,  mother,  teacher  uses?" 
Perhaps  Nurse  could  describe  what  happens 
when  two-years-old  gets  the  inkwell  down  from 
the  nursery  mantelpiece.  For  the  seven-year- 
old  the  inkwell  is  a  legitimate  stimulus.  But  I 
am  afraid  practical  family  politics  will  make  him 
wait  until  then. 

As  to  the  phenomenon  of  "early  writing,"  Dr. 
Montessori  says  that  the  study  of  this  question 
of  children's  writing  is  still  in  a  most  fragmen- 
tary state.  So  far,  indeed,  it  has  scarcely  been 
seriously  touched  upon  by  any  one  but  herself. 
Books  remain  to  be  written  on  the  subject  and 
lifetimes  of  study  given  to  it.  So  far  as  she  can 
see,  there  is  an  average  age  at  which  writing  is 
as  inevitable  an  occurrence  (given  favorable  cir- 
cumstances) as  dentition  or  walking  or  speaking. 
This  early  writing  is,  however,  scarcely  if  at  all 
connected  with  the  expression  of  ideas.  Prob- 
ably all  mothers  who  watch  their  children's  de- 
.velopment  are  aware  of  this.  The  child  plays 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  BASIS  57 

about  with  written  language  for  months  and 
years  before  it  attempts  to  express  ideas  in  writ- 
ing. It  ought  no  more  to  be  checked  in  doing  so 
than  we  prevent  the  tiny  baby  from  making  in- 
terminable series  of  vowel  and  consonant  sounds 
by  which  it  does  not  mean,  or  even  wish  to  mean, 
anything  at  all.  Much  later,  when  the  wish  for 
expression  comes,  the  means  will  be  there,  ready 
and  perfected.  That  the  writing  is  done  for 
the  fun  of  writing  was  proved  by  a  distinguished 
inspector  of  the  Montessori  schools  in  Rome, 
who  found  the  children  as  enthusiastic  in  writing 
sheer  gibberish  when  dictated  to  them  as  in  writ- 
ing "mamma"  or  "zucchero"  or  anything  else. 

Further,  when  the  child  begins  to  read  (about 
five  and  a  half  or  six)  it  does  not  read  "for  sense" 
as  the  grown-up  person  does,  but  for  mere  pleas- 
ure in  the  legible  word.  A  mistress  in  a  Mon- 
tessori school  in  America  saw  a  little  boy,  at  the 
grammar  stage,  poring  passionately  over  a  tale 
of  ancient  Greece  and  thought  she  had  found  a 
budding  classical  scholar.  The  little  student 
looked  up  at  her  with  a  beaming  smile:  "I  have 
found  twenty-six  adjectives,"  he  said,  "in  one 
page."  The  parents  of  the  children  in  the  early 
Montessori  schools  of  the  slums  of  Rome  com- 
plained to  Dr.  Montessori  of  the  tiresomeness  of 
the  children  on  the  customary  Sunday  family 
outings.  The  children  would  not  come  along,  but 


58  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

insisted  on  stopping  everywhere  to  read.  They 
read  aloud  the  posters  on  the  hoardings  and  the 
names  on  the  shops,  the  municipal  exhortations 
to  decorum,  and  the  destinations  on  the  fronts  of 
the  trams.  The  parents  were  bored  because, 
being  themselves  for  the  most  part  illiterate,  such 
things  did  not  interest  them  at  all.  The  direc- 
tress, for  reading  matter,  gave  these  children 
anything  that  occurred  to  her :  lists  of  towns  and 
lists  of  rivers,  tram  tickets  or  handbills,  or  a 
page  torn  from  the  price  list  of  a  drapery  store. 
Much  later  the  idea  would  dawn  on  &  child 
that  there  was  an  intelligence  behind  the  printed 
matter,  endeavoring  by  means  of  it  to  convey 
something  to  him.  Then  the  directress  had  to 
run  from  place  to  place:  "Signorina!  this  one 
says  (so-and-so),"  "Signorina!  this  other  one 
says  (something  else)." 

Dr.  Montessori  dwells  on  all  this  because  she 
wants  educators  to  understand  that  this  matter 
of  the  development  of  children's  activities  has 
never  yet  been  fully  investigated.  She  does  not 
dogmatize.  She  recognizes  that  the  whole  ques- 
tion as  regards  children  is  perpetually  open. 
Life  is  ever  new,  and  no  two  children  are  alike. 
She  has  invented  her  system  of  education,  as  I 
have  said  above,  largely  for  the  sake  of  securing 
an  atmosphere  in  which  they  may  "be  them- 
selves," so  that  now  we  are  permitted  to  discover 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  BASIS  59 

something  about  them.  The  child,  she  maintains, 
has  never  yet  been  observed  in  its  own  congenial 
habitat,  which  habitat  must  include  sufficient 
sympathy  and  affection  and  common  sense  on 
the  part  of  its  investigators.  A  formal  child 
psychology  on  logical  principles  is  not  enough. 
Prof.  Foster  Watson  has  said  of  the  experimen- 
tal psychology  of  to-day,  that  he  would  like  to 
prohibit  the  study  of  it  for  teachers  and  send  all 
the  teachers  out  into  the  country  to  live  on  farms, 
and  let  the  farmers  teach  them  what  farm-folk 
know  about  the  conditions  of  growth  and  what 
the  experimental  psychologists  do  not.  The  child 
has  been  considered  empirically  and  not  scienti- 
fically— in  the  light  of  what  we  imagine  about 
him  and  not  as  he  really  is.  The  grown-up  is 
so  much  engaged  in  theorizing  on  what  is  about 
him,  that  he  ends  by  not  seeing  anything  at  all. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

WHAT  IS  PSYCHOLOGY? 

A  CERTAIN  amount  of  opposition  to  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori's  views  arises  from  the  fact  that  they  do 
not  fit  in  with  much  that  is  believed  to  have  been 
conclusively  proved  in  the  psychological  labora- 
tory. I  took  her  recently  a  book  in  which  her 
doctrines  were  proved  by  the  writer,  with  chapter 
and  verse,  to  be  psychologically  heretical. 

"All  one  can  reply  to  such  a  one,"  she  said, 
"is  to  suggest  that  he  should  open  his  eyes.  I 
cannot  help  it  if  things  which  he  states  to 
be  impossible  continually  happen.  After  all 
whether  transfer  of  training  takes  place  or  not, 
we  are  all,  every  day  of  our  lives,  meeting  new 
combinations  of  circumstances  and  overcoming 
them  by  means  of  aptitudes  already  developed 
elsewhere.  If  the  ways  of  the  Almighty  are  not 
humanly  logical,  it  is  not  the  fault  of  the  Al-» 
mighty  but  of  the  limitations  of  human  logic. 
It  is  fortunate,  I  think,  that  nature  is  not 
bounded  by  human  reason  and  by  laboratory 
work  and  experimentation,  for  by  the  laws  of 

60 


WHAT  IS  PSYCHOLOGY?  61 

pure  reason  and  by  microscopic  investigation  it 
might  easily  have  been  proved,  long  before  this, 
that  children  could  not  be  born.  And  yet,  if  it 
did  not  happen  constantly,  the  rationalizer  would 
not  be  there  to  rationalize!  Non  ci  sarebbero 
uomini  e  non  ci  sarebbe  im  mondo.  The  whole 
thing  would  be  finished,  and  we  should  not  need 
to  bother  about  it  at  all!" 

Dr.  Montessori  remembers  an  occasion  when  a 
distinguished  woman  scientist  from  Vienna  rose, 
up  in  the  midst  of  a  congress  of  scientists  who 
had  conclusively  proved  by  a  series  of  investi- 
gations into  the  waste  of  phosphorus  (the  medi- 
cal catchword  of  the  day),  the  incompatibility 
of  brainwork  and  the  functions  of  motherhood. 
"My  friends  and  colleagues,"  said  the  woman 
scientist,  "please  disprove  my  nine  children." 
In  the  same  way  Dr.  Montessori  thinks  it  is  up 
to  such  experimental  psychologists  as  disagree 
with  her  findings  to  come  and  observe  her  chil- 
dren and  disprove  the  things  that  they  do.  On 
the  results  of  what  she  has  seen  happen,  not 
once,  but  again  and  again,  she  has  based  the 
theory  in  her  books.  All  her  theory  is  a  syn- 
thesis of  constantly  observed  facts.  If  it  is  (as 
has  been  maintained)  "too  ecstatic  to  be  scien- 
tific," that  is  because  science  hitherto  has  put  on 
its  spectacles  and  observed  children  as  if  they 
were  so  many  little  anatomical  preparations. 


62  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

But  the  whole  child  includes  that  part  of  the 
child  which  tells  the  truth  and  which  loves  its 
mother — and  which  thinks  the  scientist  an  unin- 
teresting fellow  and  incredibly  old;  but  to  that 
(very  excusably)  the  scientist  turns  a  blind  eye! 

No  one,  in  all  this  world,  will  ever  have  been 
so  liberally  educated  that  he  will  be  safe  in  dog- 
matizing about  psychology.  For  in  psychology 
the  argumentum  ad  personam  is  always  valid, 
and  often  the  only  clue  to  the  investigator's  mis- 
takes. Some  of  the  innumerable  points  of  view 
which  are  essential  to  the  understanding  of  fun- 
damental questions  are  almost  certain  to  get  left 
out.  In  everything  that  you  say  about  human 
nature  you  "give  away"  your  own  condition,  and 
you  are  never  safe  in  saying  that  you  know  when 
it  may  be  patent  to  your  neighbor  by  a  hundred 
indications  that  you  do  not. 

Dr.  Montessori  knows  perfectly  well  that  her 
refusal  to  accept  much  current  psychological 
theory  is  put  down  to  ignorance  on  her  part  of 
what  has  been  done  in  this  matter.  Many  Ameri- 
can experimental  psychologists  decided  that,  as 
she  does  not  read  English,  she  did  not  know  what 
they  had  been  doing.  The  truth  of  the  matter 
is  that  she  sees  in  the  current  experimental  psy- 
chology, both  of  Italy  and  America,  the  German 
stigmata  of  arbitrariness  and  myopia.  As  a 
young  medical  student  her  soul  revolted  against 


WHAT  IS  PSYCHOLOGY?  63 

the  interminable  measurement  of  skulls,  empty 
boxes  out  of  which  the  life  had  fled.  Later,  when 
she  saw  eminent  psychiatrists  substantiating  their 
hypotheses  by  experiments  on  vivisected  animals, 
she  knew  that  there  was  no  possible  analogy  be- 
tween the  life  of  these  maimed  creatures  and  the 
child  that  she  could  hear  outside,  laughing  and 
skipping  down  the  street.  What  light  could 
these  ugly  minutiae  throw  on  the  psychology  of 
a  beloved  friend,  of  a  Socrates,  of  an  Antoninus, 
of  a  Gautama?  She  does  not  undervalue  inves- 
tigation. Everything  must  be  tested  and  scru- 
tinized and  examined,  and  the  psychology  of  the 
laboratory  may  prove  many  things,  but  it  does 
not  throw  even  so  much  light  as  do  conscience 
and  common  sense  on  the  problems  of  daily  life. 
Investigation  must  be  alive,  and  she  has  founded 
her  schools  largely  for  the  purpose  of  facilitating 
live  investigation.  Investigation,  further,  must 
be  undertaken  with  the  intention  not  of  being 
clever,  but  of  finding  out.  Love  and  faith  and 
humility  are  the  prime  needs  for  the  student  of 
human  nature.  Christ  is  the  true  psychologist, 
not  Freud. 

In  the  book  to  which  I  have  referred  excep- 
tion is  taken  to  the  "education  of  the  senses." 
There  is  enough  education  for  the  senses,  the 
author  thinks,  in  the  ordinary  run  of  the  child's 
life;  any  further  training  of  the  senses  will  tend 


64  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

to  fade,  and  such  sensorial  training  is  of  no  more 
educational  value  than  the  old  unpleasant  lesson 
qua  mental  discipline.  Dr.  Montessori's  reply  is 
that  we  must  recognize  in  every  child  at  least 
the  potentiality  of  music,  the  arts,  and  crafts- 
manship. Thought,  speech,  and  writing  are  not 
the  final  and  only  means  of  human  expression. 
This  era,  already,  is  beginning  to  find  them  in- 
adequate. Reason  lags  behind  reality,  and  the 
birth  of  new  modes  of  apprehension  must  be 
prepared.  Craftsmen  know  that  there  are 
things,  such  as  difference  of  texture  and  differ- 
ence of  timbre,  which  are  not,  and  never  will  be, 
in  the  books.  The  Montessori  children  "sense" 
things  that  there  is  not,  and  never  will  be,  any 
means  of  defining  in  words.  They  do  this  gladly 
in  the  early  stages  when  no  other  form  of  ap- 
prehension is  open  to  them.  Babies  of  two  sort 
out  velvets  and  silks  in  twos  and  twos,  and  red 
tablets  and  blue  tablets  in  pairs  again.  They 
are  given  such  things  to  work  on  because  the 
senses  are  awake  at  two  and  reasoning  powers 
are  not.  So  the  suspicionable  sense-training  re- 
solves itself  into  an  exercise  of  the  power  of  fine 
discrimination  before  the  child  has  had  imposed 
upon  it  the  more  indiscriminate  culture  that  is 
based  in  words. 

Dr.  Montessori  explained  to  her  students  at 
St.  Bride's  these  uses  of  her  material. 


of 

vi 


WHAT  IS  PSYCHOLOGY?  65 

"The  fine  differentiation,"  she  said,  "that  the 
child  learns  through  the  use  of  the  material 
changes  the  face  of  nature  for  the  child.  All 
objects  henceforth  describe  themselves  to  the 
child.  All  objects  seems  to  say  to  the  child,  'I 
am  like  this — I  am  like  that.'  The  child  follows 
them  in  a  kind  of  ecstasy.  So  it  discovers  the 
world,  and  the  world,  which  is  infinitely  richer 
and  more  logical  than  this  material,  completes 
its  education." 

Dr.  Montessori  had  thought,  at  one  time,  that 
it  was  only  necessary  to  demonstrate  the  appli- 
cation of  common  sense  to  psychology  in  order 
that  students  of  psychology  would  gladly  em- 
brace it,  but  she  has  come  now  to  believe  that 
common  sense  is  not  so  very  common  after  all. 
"Buon  senso  raro"  would  perhaps  be  a  better 
term  than  fcbuon  senso  commune"!  The  old  path 
of  error  has  to  be  followed  till  the  student,  con- 
vinced of  its  futility,  turns  back  of  his  own  ac- 
cord, just  as  the  child  can  only  find  by  making 
mistakes  the  way  to  do  things  right.  She  used  to 
be  impatient,  but  now  she  is  content  to  wait  for 
humanity  to  explode  one  by  one  into  common 
sense,  just  as  children  arrive  of  their  own  ac- 
cord, by  degrees,  at  every  form  of  human  activity 
that  is  put  within  their  reach.  Whether  it  hap- 
pens this  century  or  next  she  does  not,  as  a 
scientist,  mind.  Many  scientists  have  died  long 


66  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

before  science  accepted  their  discoveries.  Never- 
theless, she  cannot  help  trying  to  hurry  things 
up,  because  she  knows  that  the  sooner  the  truth 
is  understood  about  children,  the  happier  chil- 
dren will  be  allowed  to  be. 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  THE  NEW-BORN 

AT  a  meeting  of  the  Norland  Institute — the 
first  reunion  of  members  that  has  taken  place 
since  the  war — Dr.  Montessori  indicated  the  di- 
rection that  her  activities  are  likely  to  take  in 
the  next  few  years.  "In  a  city  of  Spain,"  she 
said,  facilities  have  been  put  at  her  disposal  for 
any  line  of  research  that  she  may  consider  most 
valuable.  The  Jesuits  thought  that  if  they  could 
have  the  child  from  birth  till  seven  it  would  grow 
up  as  they  wished.  Dr.  Montessori  believes  that 
if  we  can  keep  the  hands  of  the  adult  generation 
off  the  child  from  birth  till  seven  it  will  have  a 
good  chance  of  growing  up  as  Nature  intends. 
What  Dr.  Montessori  has  asked  of  the  Catalan 
Government  is  the  foundation  of  what  Dr.  Eric 
Pritchard  at  the  same  meeting  stated  to  be  lack- 
ing in  this  country,  although  the  nursery  colleges 
have  done  work  in  this  direction — "an  institute 
of  puericulture."  Among  hundreds  of  tiny 
foundlings  she  hopes  now  to  sit  at  the  feet  of 
life  in  a  form  that  has  hitherto  had  practically  no 

67 


68  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

bearing  on  the  training  of  the  teacher — the  life 
of  the  baby. 

No  doubt  certain  of  her  critics  will  take  this 
as  evidence  of  further  intention  on  her  part  to 
lay  hands  upon  human  nature  and  mold  it  to 
given  ends — to  make  of  it  by  subtle  means  some- 
thing other  than  that  which  God  intended  it  to 
be.  To  such  she  can  only  repeat  the  assurance 
that  life  is  not  of  its  nature  susceptible  to  human 
meddling.  It  can  be  stunted,  and  has  been  per- 
sistently stunted.  But  the  determination  of  its 
course,  the  diversion  or  transformation  of  what 
is  within,  is  not  within  the  power  of  any  kind  of 
education.  "Our  inner  governing  self,"  says 
Marcus  Aurelius,  "is  that  which  is  self-excited 
and  self -swayed,  which  makes  itself  just  what  it 
wills  to  be."  If  we  stand  aside  and  do  not  con- 
fuse them  with  dark  counsels,  God  will  lead  his 
children  aright.  What  education  has  to  learn  is 
chiefly  how  to  stand  aside. 

Dr.  Montessori  said  to  the  Norland  nurses: 
"I  have  for  many  years  interested  myself  in  the 
study  of  children  from  three  years  upwards. 
Many  have  urged  me  to  continue  my  studies  on 
the  same  lines  with  older  children.  But  what 
I  have  felt  to  be  most  vital  is  the  need  for  more 
careful  and  particularized  study  of  the  tiny  child. 
In  the  first  three  years  of  life  the  foundations  of 
physical  and  also  of  psychic  health  are  laid.  In 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  THE  NEW-BORN    69 

these  years  the  child  not  only  increases  in  size  but 
passes  through  great  transformations.  This  is 
the  age  in  which  language  and  movement  de- 
velop. The  child  must  be  safeguarded  in  order 
that  these  activities  may  develop  freely.  The 
psychic  life  of  the  child  is  already  old  by  the 
time  it  comes  into  the  teacher's  ken.  The  teacher 
needs  for  his  guidance  the  detailed  history,  the 
enlightened  understanding  of  these  first  three 
years  of  life. 

When  I  was  invited  in  a  city  of  Spain  to  con- 
tinue my  studies  I  proposed  to  begin  studying 
the  child  from  birth.  There  is  in  Barcelona  a 
hospice  where  all  the  foundling  children  of  the 
city  and  district  are  brought  up  together.  In  this 
hospice,  which  can  take  600  children,  some  of 
the  inmates  stay  till  they  are  grown  up.  These 
girls,  I  thought,  who  necessarily  come  into  con- 
tact with  the  new-born  babies  that  are  brought 
in,  might  be  taught  to  lavish  on  their  little  com- 
panions the  same  kind  of  care  that  is  given  to 
the  children  of  the  better  classes.  Later  these 
girls  can  go  out  into  life  as  children's  nurses.  I 
chose  a  group  of  girls  of  fifteen  with  the  idea 
of  training  them  till  they  are  eighteen.  These 
girls  later  will  go  out  with  a  vocation  in  life. 
Meanwhile  the  little  children  in  the  institution 
receive  far  better  care  than  ever  before.  Thus 
this  institution  will  become  a  center  of  child 


70  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

study,  and  no  doubt  eventually  a  center  for  the 
teaching  of  teachers.  Some  day  doubtless  it  will 
be  impossible  to  imagine  a  teacher  who  has  not 
gone  through  this  preliminary  grounding.  I 
shall  hope  eventually  to  see  the  teachers  in  my 
own  schools  prepared  in  this  way  for  their  work. 
Girls  of  independent  means  will  also  come  and 
pass  through  this  training,  so  that  some  day  there 
will  be  no  mother  who  has  not  undergone  this 
kind  of  preparation  for  the  responsibilities  that 
she  undertakes.  We  cannot  progress  in  the  care 
of  humanity  unless  we  lay  this  firm  foundation, 
which  all  of  you  here  are  spending  your  lives  in 
laying — the  understanding  and  care  of  the 
baby." 

I  have  seen  the  program  for  the  work  of  this 
great  nursery,  which  is  to  be  not  only  an  infant- 
welfare  center,  but  also  a  laboratory  where  per- 
haps we  may  analyze  the  "trailing  clouds  of 
glory"  sufficiently  to  be  able  in  some  degree  to 
fix  them.  There  is  no  reason  at  all,  according  to 
Dr.  Montessori,  why,  to  use  a  simile,  kittens 
that  are  so  beautiful  should  often  grow  up  into 
unattractive  cats.  Very  certain  she  is  that  there 
are  things  known  to  babes  and  sucklings  which 
are  hidden  from  us  when  we  grow  up.  The  so- 
lution, then,  is  to  learn  to  grow  differently — to 
grow  in  stature  without  losing  wisdom  and  grace. 
To  some  degree  Dr.  Montessori  has  answered  the 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  THE  NEW-BORN    71 

insistent  demand  of  psycho-analysis  on  this 
point.  In  the  course  of  the  next  few  years  she 
hopes  to  have  far  more  to  say.  Already,  al- 
though she  has  never  been  married,  never  had 
children  of  her  own,  I  know  that  she  knows  far 
more  about  new-born  children  than  do  most  hu- 
man mothers — about  their  reaction  to  light,  to 
color,  to  sound,  to  the  unexpressed  emotions  of 
the  people  about  them,  about  their  powers  of 
communication  with  their  mothers  at  a  distance 
— things  which,  if  mothers  know,  they  do  not 
say,  for  fear  of  being  laughed  at — at  least  in 
this  rough  Anglo-Saxon  world  where  baby  and 
mother  are  always  to  some  extent  a  joke. 

Those  who  have  worked  with  Dr.  Montessori 
know  that  the  crown  of  it  has  been  to  universal- 
ize motherhood,  to  bring  into  all  dealing  with 
children  something  of  that  respect  for  the  child 
as  a  "gift  of  God,"  all  the  implications  of  which 
only  parents  know.  "I  can  assure  you,"  Signor- 
ina  Maccheroni  has  said  to  me,  "that  after  hav- 
ing been  shut  up  with  children,  under  this 
method,  for  fourteen  years,  I  know  that  this  is 
nothing  arbitrary  or  artificial  that  we  are  in- 
venting, but  that  we  are  merely  coming  on  the 
springs  and  sources  of  life  as  it  really  is." 
Things  that  have  been  hidden  from  many  are 
becoming  clear.  As  I  have  said,  there  are 
mothers — and  others — who  have  known  these 


72  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

things  always  and  not  voiced  them.  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori  is  to  these  as  a  clear  voice  explaining  their 
own  instinctive  knowledge.  They  cannot  see  ne- 
cessity for  opposition  for  what  is  to  them  as  obvi- 
ous as  the  day.  They  accept  it  freely  because 
they  have  no  stake  in  any  existing  and  different 
system  of  education.  A  woman  (a  Chinese) 
wrote  from  the  interior  of  China  soon  after  Dr. 
Montessori's  first  book  was  published.  "These 
are  truths,"  ;she  said,  "which  I  have  been  repeat- 
ing all  my  life  to  the  people  about  me,  but  they 
have  only  thought  me  sentimental  or  perhaps 
insane!"  The  master  sometimes  considers  the 
parent  "sloshy  about  his  beastly  boy."  Seldom 
do  he  and  the  parent  see  eye  to  eye.  Only  the 
mother,  after  all,  can  repeat  the  Magnificat — 
only  she  knows,  though  others  may  speculate, 
how  little  the  child  is  of  her  own  fashioning  and 
how  much  of  God's.  Many  parents,  in  their  in- 
nermost hearts,  would  be  glad  to  keep  the  heavy 
hand  of  education  as  it  now  is  off  their  children. 
But  in  the  school  of  the  future  the  child  will  be 
even  freer  and  happier  and  more  "itself"  than 
at  home. 


CHAPTER  X 

WHAT  IS  SUGGESTION? 

DR.  MONTESSORI,  in  one  of  her  lectures  at  St. 
Bride's  Institute,  explained  to  her  students  in 
detail  the  character  of  the  stimulus  that  the 
young  child  receives  from  his  exercises  with  her 
"material."  All  these  exercises  are  accompanied 
by  movement.  Left  to  itself  the  child  naturally 
combines  thought  and  action.  In  the  ordinary 
schools  the  child  is  kept  motionless  for  a  period 
while  intellectual  stimuli  are  applied  to  it,  then 
it  may  be  allowed  or  ordered  to  move.  First  we 
say  "Sit  still,"  and  then  we  cause  the  child  to 
move  for  the  Sake  of  moving.  By  so  doing  we 
dissociate  in  the  child's  personality  a  fundamen- 
tal psychological  unity.  All  thought  that  is  of 
any  value  consists  of  a  cycle  of  thought  and  ac- 
tion. The  child  must  be  launched  into  fields  of 
activity  in  connection  with  all  his  thoughts,  and 
must  gain  the  habit  of  acquiring  knowledge  only 
through  his  own  activity.  Otherwise,  as  an  adult, 
he  will  become  prone  to  think  rather  than  to  act, 
to  dissociate  mental  life  from  experience,  to  ac- 

73 


74  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

cept  secondhand  evidence,  to  enter  on  trains  of 
reasoning  that  do  not  correspond  with  fact.  The 
adult,  thus  trained,  enters  into  a  realm  of  illusion 
without  knowing  it. 

Dr.  Montessori's  next  lecture-period  was  de- 
voted to  a  demonstration  of  how  the  initial  les- 
sons in  the  use  of  the  material  are  given.  In 
Tuesday's  lecture  she  explained  the  cycle  of  nat- 
ural development  that  precedes  the  act  of  writ- 
ing. Some  one  asked  one  of  the  children,  "Who 
taught  you  to  write?"  "Who  taught  me?"  re- 
plied the  child,  puzzled.  "Nobody  taught  me;  I 
learnt."  Another  child  expressed  doubt  as  to 
whether  the  teacher  was  able  to  write.  "Chi  sa 
se  la  maestra  sa  scrivere!"  At  any  rate  it  was 
a  matter  for  speculation.  He  had  never  seen  her 
do  it  himself. 

The  promulgation  of  a  great  deal  of  common 
error  regarding  Dr.  Montessori's  aims  would  be 
avoided  if  her  critics,  besides  knowing  a  little 
more  about  the  actual  working  of  her  method, 
were  better  aware  of  the  kind  of  person  that  she 
is.  It  is  one  of  her  criteria  of  the  accuracy  of 
her  deductions  that  criticism  of  them  reaches  her 
from  people  who  "do  not  know."  Such  medical 
colleagues  of  hers  as  go  to  the  pains  of  observ- 
ing for  a  sufficient  length  of  time  what  happens 
in  Dr.  Montessori's  schools  ascribe  to  her  a 
sound,  thorough,  and  intimate  knowledge  of  the 


WHAT  IS  SUGGESTION?  75 

principles  of  child-hygiene.  But  the  majority  of 
people  take  one  look  and  go  away  and  write 
books  about  the  fallacies  they  have  inferred. 

I  asked  her  once  if  I  might  try  to  clear  up 
the  question  of  how  much  "suggestion"  was  in- 
volved in  the  results  attained  in  her  schools. 
She  said  that  I  should  probably  find  that  no 
two  of  her  critics  understood  the  same  thing  by 
the  word.  Nor  do  many  people  realize  the  scru- 
pulous care  that  a  physician  bestows  upon  all 
dealings  with  the  human  organism,  and  especially 
with  that  of  children,  nor  the  existence  of  that 
definite  (if  undefinable)  ideal  of  normality  that 
the  physician  is  constantly  working  up  to.  The 
unity  of  aim  and  of  principle  to  which  she  has 
been  accustomed  all  her  life  in  her  own  profes- 
sion has  made  it  difficult  for  Dr.  Montessori  to 
realize  the  diversity  of  opinion,  even  on  funda- 
mentals, that  exists  in  the  world  outside  of  it. 
Every  experienced  physician  carries  about  with 
him  a  mental  concept  of  working  normality — a 
vision  of  "the  middle  line  along  which  (allowing 
for  the  deviations  of  genius — -"right,  left,  and 
middle  again")  man  in  order  to  be  sane  and  to 
dwell  among  his  fellow-creatures  must  walk. 
Every  man  must  state  his  normality  in  his  own 
terms.  The  old  medicine  dealt  in  standards  un- 
related to  action  or  function — and  fell.  The  new 
admits  no  standard  except  capacity  for  action, 


76  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

i.e.  health.  The  constant  factor  of  all  normality 
is  mental  integrity — the  capacity  for  not  being 
led  or  over-persuaded :  for  keeping  the  individu- 
ality aloof  at  will  from  the  community,  the  judg- 
ment free. 

The  doctor,  moreover,  cannot  continue  to  be  a 
doctor  unless  he  knows  what  he  is  about. 
Primum  non  nocere.  Centuries  of  holding  the 
keys  of  life  and  death  have  made  him  careful. 
Unless  he  can  be  sure  of  the  benefit  of  inter- 
vention between  man  and  his  Maker  he  does  not 
intervene.  He  is  too  busy  to  meddle  for  med- 
dling's sake.  The  length  of  his  tradition  pre- 
cludes opportunism.  Miinsterberg  admits,  for 
instance,  that  the  principles  underlying  "  Chris- 
tian Science"  may  produce  immediate  beneficial 
results  for  the  neurotic  individual.  But  he  can- 
not countenance  Eddyism,  because  the  accom- 
panying blind  acceptance  of  an  undigested  meta- 
physic  would  be  an  intellectual  injury  to  his 
greater  patient,  the  human  race. 

Dejerine  goes  a  step  farther  than  Miinster- 
berg in  holding  the  same  view  with  regard  to 
hypnosis  and  even  suggestion. 

"What  the  plrysician  has  done,"  he  says,  "in 
practicing  hypnotism,  is  to  develop  the  power  of 
the  psychological  automatism  and  to  diminish  the 
value  and  intensity  of  intellectual  control.  .  .  . 
The  most  ridiculous  ideas  ...  in  a  subject  thus 


WHAT  IS  SUGGESTION?  77 

educated  .  .  .  will  tend  to  be  admitted  without 
discussion  by  him  as  real  and  demonstrable  phe- 
nomena. What  would  one  think  of  a  physician 
who,  in  order  to  diminish  some  symptom,  .  .  . 
would  order  such  medicine  as  would  at  the  same 
time  .  .  .  diminish  the  resistance  of  the  patient 
to  the  infection?" 

Modern  psychotherapy  appears  to  be  coming 
to  the  view  that  the  psychotherapist  must  be  an 
upright  man,  and  that,  given  this,  he  need  not  be 
fettered  as  to  the  means  he  uses.  I  do  not  think, 
however,  that  Dr.  Montessori  will  agree.  Direct 
suggestion  is  out  of  Dejerine's  therapeutic  ar- 
mory on  far-reaching  social  grounds,  and  Dr. 
Montessori's  views  on  this  matter  may  best  be 
summed  up  in  the  statement  that  she  is  of  the 
school  of  Dejerine,  however  old-fashioned  the 
psychotherapists  may  think  it.  In  treatment  by 
suggestion,  says  Dejerine: 

"One  deliberately  directs  one's  attention  to 
the  symptom,  and  completely  neglects  the  under- 
lying mental  stratum.  By  direct  suggestion  one 
weakens  instead  of  strengthens  the  patient's 
critical  power." 

The  upshot  of  Dejerine's  researches  comes  to 
this,  that  in  order  to  be  perfectly  healthy  it  is 
necessary  for  a  man  to  be  walking  upon  his  own 
feet  and  following  "an  ethical  or  a  philosophical 


78  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

or  a  religious  ideal."  He  holds  the  function  of 
the  doctor  to  be  "to  awaken  and  exercise  the 
power  of  recall  over  those  superior  psychologi- 
cal functions  which  emotion  and  life  have  ren- 
dered diffuse  and  which  are,  so  to  speak,  thrown 
off  their  center." 

Dr.  Montessori  looks  forward  confidently  to  a 
time  when  the  education  of  the  educator  will 
run  to  a  certain  point  on  the  same  lines  as  that 
of  the  doctor.  Then  educators  will  look  back 
on  what  Dr.  Montessori  is  now  doing  and  see 
that  it  was  good,  and  for  that  day  she  is  content 
to  wait.  Whether  medicine  is  synonymous  with 
"materialism"  those  familiar  with  the  ideals  of 
modern  medicine  may  judge  for  themselves. 

"As  we  have  a  physical  hygiene,"  says 
Dejerine,  "should  we  not  have  a  mental  hygiene, 
whose  care  it  is  to  prevent  diseases  of  the  psy- 
chism  just  as  physical  hygiene  tries  to  prevent 
diseases  of  the  body?  Why,  if  the  physician  is 
interested  in  treating  diseases  of  the  morals  and 
the  deviations  which  occur  between  the  psycho- 
physical  relations,  should  he  leave  the  work  of 
correcting  and  avoiding  defects  ...  to  the  exclu- 
sive care  of  spiritual  directors  and  pedagogues? 
That  certain  great  educators  .  .  .  have  been 
able  to  lay  down  precepts  which  will,  empirically 
at  least,  help  one  to  realize  moral  hygiene  and 
health,  is  a  fact  which  we  should  be  the  last  to 
discredit. . . .  This  does  not  prevent  us,  however, 


WHAT  IS  SUGGESTION?  79 

from  seeing  that,  if  we  want  to  find  definite 
cause  of  this  extraordinary  modern  increase  in 
neuropathic  manifestations,  we  cannot  attribute 
it  to  anything  else  but  the  modern  lack  of  moral 
education.  The  role  that  others  have  not  filled 
satisfactorily  or  have  left  unnoticed  the  physician 
has  the  right  to  adopt." 

Dr.  Montessori  says  that  before  she  can  answer 
the  general  public's  criticisms  about  "Montes- 
sorism  and  suggestion"  the  general  public  must 
decide  for  itself  what  "suggestion"  means.  If 
we  begin  to  stigmatize  everything  as  "sugges- 
tion" we  shall  be  driven  to  shut  up  every  child 
in  an  inaccessible  tower.  Every  reaction  upon 
man  of  his  environment  is  in  some  measure  sug- 
gestion, just  as  there  are  bacteria  in  everything 
we  eat.  Dr.  Montessori's  incessant  aim  has  been 
to  minimize  direct  adult  suggestion,  because  she 
wanted  to  see  what  the  child  would  do  by  itself. 
She  sees  the  child  like  an  infant  Atlas,  bowing 
its  shoulders  under  a  weight  of  inertia — erudi- 
tion, injunction,  custom,  ceremonial,  form.  She 
has  aimed  at  lightening  the  burden  so  that  the 
growing  mentality  may  stand  up  and  stretch  it- 
self and  breathe  free.  But  she  does  not  visualize 
— what  sane  person  would  ? — a  universe  in  which 
the  parental  attitude  towards  the  child  is  to  "let 
it  rip."  The  existence  of  any  form  of  education 
postulates  the  need  for  action  in  some  form  of 


80  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

the  adult  generation  on  the  generation  to  come. 
Dr.  Montessori  does  not  preclude  future  possi- 
bilities. Perhaps  some  day  human  development 
will  stop,  and  babies  be  born  as  preeducated  as 
those  of  insects,  with  whom  (being  posthumous) 
parental  suggestion  has  nothing  to  do !  But  for 
the  present  she  does  not  see  any  indications  of 
such  a  development,  and,  suggestion  or  no  sug- 
gestion, the  immature  human  faculty  is  likely  to 
go  on  being  assisted  to  maturity  by  the  more 
mature.  When  at  Berkeley,  California,  the  Na- 
tional Education  Association  convened  a  meet- 
ing to  discuss  this  very  question  she  found  that 
without  giving  those  there  assembled  a  prolonged 
course  of  highly  specialized  explanation  there 
was  very  little  that  she  could  say.  One  remark 
she  vouchsafed.  "L'ipnotismo  fa  dormire"  she 
said.  ffNoi  vogliamo  risvegliare" 


CHAPTER  XI 

WHAT  IS  MUSIC? 

AFTER  listening  to  Signorina  Maccheroni's  lec- 
ture at  the  Mortimer  Hall  on  what  Dr.  Yorke- 
Trotter,  who  took  the  chair,  called  "the  musical 
method  adopted  by  Dr.  Montessori,"  I  sought 
her  out  to  congratulate  her,  and  found  her  dis- 
tressed that  the  time  had  passed  so  quickly  and 
that  she  had  managed  to  say  so  little.  "I  am 
not  a  great  musician,"  she  said.  "Some  one 
ought  to  take  up  this  germ  of  a  method  and  de- 
velop it."  In  fact,  a  well-known  musician,  a 
woman,  came  to  me  after  these  words  had  been 
published  and  asked  to  be  put  in  touch  with 
Signorina  Maccheroni,  for  the  things  that  she 
had  said  as  to  the  nature  of  music  and  the  nat- 
ural human  attitude  towards  music,  were  things 
that  she  felt  to  be  vaguely  beginning  to  stir  in 
that  realm  apart,  "the  musical  world."  In  the 
course  of  the  lecture,  Signorina  Maccheroni  said 
that  people  were  often  kind  enough  to  ascribe 
the  musical  work  in  the  Montessori  method  to 
her,  and  that  in  return  she  could  only  say  that 
she  had  been  studying  music  for  a  long  time  be- 

81 


82  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

fore  she  met  Dr.  Montessori,  but  that  it  had 
never  occurred  to  her  to  approach  music  in  this 
way.  She  thanked  the  public,  therefore,  but 
would  ask  them  to  render  unto  Csesar  the  things 
that  were  Cassar's. 

In  nothing  more  than  in  this  approach  to  the 
study  of  music  do  I,  personally,  see  the  identity 
of  the  Montessori  movement  with  modern  intui- 
tive philosophy.  Music,  by  the  old  standards, 
was  an  aid  to  religion,  a  recreation,  sometimes 
only  a  mathematical  game.  By  the  new  stand- 
ards it  is  a  means  of  expression,  a  means  of 
communication.  In  his  subtle,  unerring,  cut- 
and-thrust  way  Bergson  constantly  attacks  and 
undermines  the  language  scaffolding  of  human 
thought.  With  the  help  of  language  the  human 
being  has  become  a  social  being:  at  the  same 
time  his  mentality  has  grown  on  to  that  scaffold- 
ing like  a  crust  of  barnacles. 

"We  commit  ourselves,"  says  Bergson,  "to  a 
confusion  which  arises  from  language,  and  which 
is  due  to  the  fact  that  language  is  not  meant  to 
convey  all  the  delicate  shades  of  inner  states." 

The  useful  artifice  of  speech  gradually  per- 
vades life,  all  metaphysics,  and  makes  living  and 
thinking  rigid  and  artificial: 

"How  could  the  self,  which  distinguishes 
external  objects  so  sharply  and  represents  them 


WHAT  IS  MUSIC?  83 

so  easily  by  means  of  symbols,  withstand  the 
temptation  to  introduce  the  same  distinctions 
into  its  own  life  and  to  replace  the  interpenetra- 
tion  of  its  psychic  states  by  a  numerical  plurality 
of  terms  which  are  distinguished  from  one  an- 
other, set  side  by  side,  and  expressed  by  means 
of  words?  In  place  of  a  heterogeneous  duration 
whose  moments  permeate  one  another,  we  thus 
get  a  homogeneous  time  whose  moments  are 
strung  on  a  spatial  line.  In  place  of  an  inner 
life  whose  successive  phases,  each  unique  in  its 
kind,  cannot  be  expressed  in  the  fixed  terms  of 
language,  we  get  a  self  which  can  be  artificially 
reconstructed,  and  simple  psychic  states  which 
can  be  added  to  and  taken  from  each  other  just 
like  the  letters  of  the  alphabet  in  forming  words. 
.  .  .  Our  psychic  states,  separating  from  each 
other,  get  solidified;  between  our  ideas,  thus 
crystallized,  and  our  external  movements  we 
shall  witness  permanent  associations  being 
formed ;  and  little  by  little  automatism  will  cover 
over  freedom." 

"We  have  reached  this  result  through  deduc- 
tion," says  Bergson,  characteristically,  at  the 
end  of  one  of  his  most  brilliant  chapters  on 
"Laughter,"  "but  I  imagine  that  clowns  have 
long  had  an  intuition  of  the  fact."  In  the  same 
way,  musicians  and  painters  have  long  had  the 
intuition  of  what  Bergson,  with  his  astonishing 
mastery  of  the  mechanism  of  thought  and  speech, 
has  been  able,  now  first  among  men,  to  put  into 


84  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

print.  A  refrain  runs  constantly  through  the 
writings  of  those  who  are  writers  and  thinkers 
second  and  artists  and  craftsmen  first — 

"Je  suis  las  des  mots,  je  suis  las  d'entendre  ce  qui 
peut  mentir." 

Browning,  with  the  Persian  poets,  agrees  that 
however  much  doctor  and  saint  may  argue  it 
does  not  matter,  because  the  singer  knows. 

"Let  the  Sufi  flout: 

Of  my  base  Metal  may  be  forged  a  Key 
That  shall  unlock  the  Door  he  howls  without/* 

The  intuitive  standpoint  is  neglected  in  the  edu- 
cational world ;  but  artists  almost  everywhere  un- 
derstand not  only  Dr.  Montessori's  music  method 
but  her  whole  conception  of  human  development, 
from  the  simple  concrete  baby-beginnings — the 
touching  one  by  one  of  the  notes  of  life — up  to 
the  highest  known  syntheses,  themselves  the  em- 
bryological  beginnings  of  something  else. 

Is  music  the  speech  of  the  future?  Only  the 
future  can  answer.  The  woman  musician  of 
whom  I  have  spoken  said  that  she  did  not  see 
why  so  many  people  should  have  given  up  thei^ 
lives  so  blindly  to  developing  it  if  something 
more  were  not  to  come  of  it  than  has  come  yet. 
M.  Jaques-Dalcroze  has  emphasized  to  me  the 
fact  that  it  is  far  more  than  the  ear  and  the  audi- 


WHAT  IS  MUSIC?  85 

tory  center  that  hears.  He  has  said  to  me  that 
it  is  the  whole  body  that  hears,  but  is  willing  to 
admit  that  the  'unconscious'  of  the  psycho- 
analysts may  include  all  that  which  is  voiced  by 
music.  He  thinks  that  psycho-analysis  is  on  the 
track  of  more  things  than  it  as  yet  guesses  at. 
In  Italy  music  is  already  a  great  deal  nearer 
to  being  a  common  means  of  communication  than 
it  is  here.  Year  after  year  the  "Fiera  di  Piedi- 
grotta"  brings  to  light  a  hundred  wild-bird  songs 
in  which  the  illiterate  fishermen  of  Naples  tell 
their  innamorate  a  million  things  that  no  school 
teaching  could  ever  teach  them  to  say.  The 
vinesmen  on  the  slopes  above  Sorrento  improvise 
the  canto  a  figliola  as  in  the  days  when  the  Ro- 
man fleet  lay  off  Misenum,  to  the  antiphonal 
answer  of  some  maiden  in  the  fields  beyond.  I 
knew  myself  very  well  a  Tuscan  peasant  woman, 
illiterate,  a  daughter  of  generations  of  the  sculp- 
tors of  Volterra,  who  as  she  went  about  her  cook- 
ing and  housework  would  sing  from  end  to  end, 
overture,  intermezzi,  and  all,  an  opera  of  Verdi 
or  Donizetti  that  once  by  some  stroke  of  good 
fortune  she  had  been  taken  to  hear.  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori  said  to  me  once  that  every  nation  is  al- 
ways glad  to  acknowledge  its  past  debts  to  other 
nations,  but  that  no  nation  is  ever  willing  to 
recognize  that  now,  at  this  present  moment,  it 
has  anything  to  learn  from  any  other.  So  that  if 


86  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

one  wished  the  intuitive  attitude  towards  music 
to  prevail  it  would  be  well  not  to  say  that  we  are 
to  sit  at  the  feet  of  Italy;  and  yet  this  is  so. 

Signorina  Maccheroni's  approach  to  music  is 
not  through  the  notation  (as  she  assures  me  is 
the  case  in  many  schools  in  Italy,  as  well  as 
here) .  Although,  as  I  know,  she  has  not  studied 
Bergson,  she  has  arrived  by  another  road  at  the 
same  conception  of  the  musical  phrase  which 
Bergson  uses  to  illustrate  the  succession  of  con- 
scious states.  "The  notes  succeed  one  another," 
he  says,  "yet  we  perceive  them  in  one  another, 
and  their  totality  may  be  compared  to  that  of  a 
living  being  whose  parts,  though  distinct,  per- 
meate one  another  just  because  they  are  so  closely 
connected."  Interruption  causes  a  qualitative 
change  in  the  whole  of  the  musical  phrase.  I  was 
astonished  the  other  day  to  hear  Dr.  Montessori, 
who  has  worked  and  thought  in  total  indepen- 
dence of  Bergson,  use,  in  describing  her  concep- 
tion of  a  musical  phrase,  the  same  analogy  that 
is  used  by  Bergson  of  the  strokes  of  a  clock  melt- 
ing into  one  another  before  it  has  occurred  to  us 
to  count  them,  and  yet  giving  when  we  think 
back  over  them  the  impression  that  the  clock  has 
struck  two  or  three. 

It  was  also  interesting  to  see  Signorina  Mac- 
cheroni  take  the  chalk  and  draw  on  the  black- 
board her  conception  of  dance  music  as  a  series 


WHAT  IS  MUSIC?  87 

of  curves,  the  recurring  crises  of  which  will  call 
forth  rhythmical  movements  in  the  children  if 
they  are  left  to  interpret  freely,  and  to  follow 
or  not  as  they  please.  I  have  talked  to  Signorina 
Maccheroni  on  this  subject,  and  her  insistence 
that  "counting"  on  the  part  of  the  music-teacher 
or  the  children  is  death  to  the  music  is  all  one 
with  Bergson's  statement  that  we  cannot  count 
ideas  which  permeate  one  another,  unless  we  rep- 
resent them  by  homogeneous  units  which  occupy 
separate  positions  in  space  and  consequently  no 
longer  permeate  one  another.  Signorina  Mac- 
cheroni shakes  her  head  at  metaphysical  explana- 
tions. ffNon  lo  so"  she  says,  "but  I  know  that  it 
is  quite  wrong  to  mix  up  music  and  counting. 
If  the  teacher  is  going  to  drill  the  children's 
movements  by  heavily  accenting  all  the  first  notes 
of  all  the  bars,  she  will  do  better  to  shut  up  the 
piano  and  say  'One,  two;  one,  two.' '  M.  Dai- 
croze,  in  a  discussion  with  Signorina  Maccheroni 
and  myself,  said  exactly  the  same  thing,  illustrat- 
ing his  conception  of  musical  rhythm  by  a  series 
of  curves  drawn  in  the  air  with  his  hands.  Dr. 
Montessori  ascribes  a  good  deal  of  the  prevalent 
mechanization  of  living  functions  to  the  fact  that 
we  are  living  in  an  era  of  machinery,  and  the 
force  of  the  movement  which  she  represents  to 
the  fact  that  we  are  beginning  to  find  out  that 
machinery  is  not  everything  after  all,  just  as  the 


88  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

Germans  had  to  find  out  that  the  German  social 
order  was  not  everything.  Life  existed  before 
the  invention  of  machinery,  and  music  existed 
before  the  organization  of  music  into  semibreves, 
minims  and  crotchets,  quavers,  semiquavers,  and 
demisemiquavers. 

As  Signorina  Maccheroni  said  the  other  day 
in  her  lecture,  in  dealing  with  music  for  children 
we  are  only  dealing  with  the  embryology  of 
music,  with  its  simple  elements,  which  children 
can  grasp.  But  in  no  music  method  before  this 
have  the  children  been  given  the  actual  elements 
to  do  what  they  like  with.  The  tiniest  children 
in  the  Montessori  schools  have  the  simple  notes* 
to  play  with  and  listen  to,  just  as  they  have  the 
colors  blue  or  yellow  or  red.  The  instruments 
fix  the  note  for  the  child  and  enables  it  to  do  all 
the  exercises  with  sounds  that  are  done  with 
colors — matching,  pairing,  grading.  None  of 
this  could  be  done  if  the  only  means  of  producing 
a  sound  was  to  sing.  The  bells  represent  the 
alphabet  of  sound.  Dr.  Yorke-Trotter  thinks 
that  any  instrument  which  gives  a  single  note 
gives  so  impure  a  note  that  this  may  raise  diffi- 
culties, but  the  children  seem  to  recognize  the 
sound  that  is  intended.  No  doubt  the  instru- 
ments are  susceptible  of  improvement.  A  child 
of  three  will  take  one  of  the  resonant  bells,  and 
strike  it  again  and  again,  listening  to  the  fading 


WHAT  IS  MUSIC?  89 

vibrations  to  the  end.  Then  it  will  strike  an- 
other and  listen  to  that.  Nobody  interferes  with 
it  or  makes  it  pair  the  notes,  or  combine  them,  or 
make  successions  of  them,  or  write  them  down 
on  paper,  till  it  wishes  to.  Thus  it  can  explore 
for  itself  at  leisure,  at  the  age  when  such  things 
please  it,  the  mysteries  of  quality  and  pitch, 
which  so  many  grown-up  musicians  do  not  un- 
derstand. The  attitude  towards  pitch  of  the 
Montessori  school  is  exemplified  by  the  care  that 
is  taken  to  make  a  set  of  bells  used  by  the  chil- 
dren of  precisely  the  same  size.  Scales  are 
formed  by  the  children  for  themselves  with  an 
apparatus  of  single  notes  which  can  be  mixed  up 
and  sorted  out  again  and  placed  in  any  order 
the  children  wish.  Thus  the  conception  of  pitch 
is  not  affected  by  any  fixed  succession  visible  to 
the  eye.  The  best  comment  is  again  in  the  words 
of  Bergson: 

"I  grant,"  he  says,  "that  a  sharper  sound  calls 
up  the  picture  of  a  higher  position  in  space.  But 
does  it  follow  from  this  that  the  notes  of  the 
scale,  as  auditory  sensations,  differ  otherwise  than 
in  quality?  Forget  what  you  have  learnt  from 
physics,  examine  carefully  your  idea  of  a  higher 
or  lower  note,  and  see  whether  you  do  not  think 
simply  of  the  greater  or  less  effort  which  the 
tensor  muscle  of  your  vocal  chords  has  to  make 
in  order  to  produce  the  note?  As  the  effort  by 
which  your  voice  passes  from  one  note  to  another 


90  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

is  discontinuous,  you  picture  to  yourself  these 
successive  notes  as  points  in  space;  this  is  why 
you  establish  intervals  between  the  notes  of  the 
scale.  Now,  why  is  the  line  along  which  we 
dispose  them  vertical  rather  than  horizontal,  and 
why  do  we  say  that  the  sound  ascends  in  some 
cases  and  descends  in  others?  .  .  .  The  sound 
would  remain  a  pure  quality  if  we  did  not  bring 
in  the  muscular  effort  which  produces  it  or  the 
vibrations  which  explain  it." 

All  children  who  are  not  deaf  have  an  ear  for 
distinction  of  sounds.  Whether  they  will  become 
musicians  or  not  is  another  matter.  At  all  events, 
says  Signorina  Maccheroni,  we  ought  to  give 
them  the  chance. 

The  a  priori  attitude  of  a  section  of  the  Eng- 
lish Press,  "inviting  correspondence,"  was  shown 
up  recently  on  this  very  question  of  music.  An 
article  was  announced  on  the  subject  "Montes- 
sori  and  Music,"  by  a  writer  who  knew  nothing 
at  firsthand  of  Dr.  Montessori's  methods  and 
aims.  It  was  suggested  to  him  that  he  might 
wish  to  hear  more  before  writing.  He  did  not, 
however,  care  to  approach  the  subject  more 
closely,  but  stated  that  what  had  already  been 
said  was  sufficient  to  convince  him  that  there  was 
nothing  of  any  value  to  be  learnt.  I  am  told  that 
the  article  which  finally  appeared  was  definitely 
hostile  to  Dr.  Montessori,  and  overlooked  the 


WHAT  IS  MUSIC?  91 

point  that  Dr.  Montessori  is  not  approaching 
music  as  a  * 'subject,"  with  a  history,  and  a  litera- 
ture, but  simply  as  a  natural  faculty  of  the 
human  child  and,  so  far  as  she  has  at  present 
gone,  of  the  very  small  child,  almost  the  baby. 
The  older  children  in  the  school  at  Barcelona  are 
taught  on  the  Dalcroze  method.  M.  Dalcroze 
tells  me  that  the  Montessori  children  are  the 
quickest  of  all  children  to  pick  up  eurhythonics. 
His  own  little  boy  goes  to  a  Montessori  school. 
The  simple,  jingling  music  there  used  is,  as  Dr. 
Yorke-Trotter  has  said  to  me,  like  the  nursery 
rhyme,  the  artistic  form  that  the  little  child  it- 
self prefers.  In  the  same  way  we  give  milk  to 
babes.  But  the  connoisseur  might  think  that  the 
baby  ought  to  prefer  China  tea. 


CHAPTER  XII 

MONTESSORI  AND  BERGSON 

WHEN  I  began  writing  these  articles  Dr. 
Montessori  and  M.  Bergson  were  unacquainted 
with  one  another.  About  the  middle  of  October, 
1919, 1  had  the  pleasure  of  meeting  Dr.  Crichton- 
Miller.  Before  we  parted  he  said  a  few  words 
which  confirmed  something  that  had  been  in  my 
own  mind  for  a  long  time.  "This  method,"  he 
said,  "will  have  to  be  considered  in  connection 
with  the  philosophy  of  Bergson  and  the  psycho- 
analytical work  of  Jung."  These  three,  in  fact, 
he  thought,  were  mining  in  apparent  independ- 
ence of  one  another  towards  an  identical  point. 
Bergson  is  stating,  with  perfect  lucidity,  the 
conditions  of  the  fall  of  Adam — the  colossal  mis- 
take that  has  been  at  the  bottom  of  human  misery 
since  the  beginning,  not  of  time,  but  of  time 
stated  by  human  utilitarianism  in  incompatible 
terms.  Psycho-analysis  is  seeking  out  in  each 
individual  life  the  processes  of  this  misadaptation. 
Dr.  Montessori  is  working  to  secure  that  mis- 
adaptation  shall  not  take  place. 

92 


MONTESSORI  AND  BERGSON  92 

Nothing  can  be  more  ridiculous  than  the 
ground  on  which  Dr.  Montessori  is  sometimes 
criticized:  that  she  has  arrived  at  nothing 
coherent  and  nothing  new.  Prof.  Boyd's  From 
Locke  to  Montessori,  published  in  1914,  is  as 
beside  the  mark  as  Dr.  Davidson's  Rousseau, 
published  in  1898.  For  all  through  his  examina- 
tion of  the  Montessori  method  he  is  floundering 
in  search  of  the  philosophical  clue  which  will 
unite  what  seems  to  him  a  congeries  of  discon- 
nected notions,  a  pseudo-system  of  scraps.  The 
inference  is  either  that  he  had  not  at  that  time 
read  Bergson,  or  that  Bergson's  doctrine  is  to 
him  nonsense.  Dr.  Montessori  endorses  a  great 
part  of  what  Bergson  says  from  her  daily  ex- 
perience in  the  schools,  and  probably  every  one 
who  understands  Bergson  will  eventually  come 
to  understand  what  Dr.  Montessori  is  doing. 
Innumerable  men  in  the  street,  unencumbered 
with  theory,  can  see  what  Bergson  is  driving  at, 
as  plainly  as  they  can  see  that  the  traffic  is  set- 
ting cityward  or  the  wind  making  for  rain.  What 
Bergson  represents  is  too  widely  diffused  for  it 
to  be  safe  to  say  much  on  any  subject  unless  one 
can  keep  pace  with  him.  Moreover,  whatever  his 
merits  or  demerits,  he  has  made  many  of  our 
time-honored  methods  of  arriving  at  conclusions 
into  scrap-iron  and  old  plant.  He  gave  Dr. 
Montessori,  when  she  met  him,  the  impression 


94  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

of  a  spirit  unfettered  by  the  old  mental  processes. 
The  disappointment  of  criticism  when  it  finds 
innovation  not  to  be  totally  new  is  based  on 
short-sightedness  and  ignorance.  No  great 
thinker  claims  a  monopoly.  To  posterity  he  be- 
comes a  token  of  the  "new  thought"  of  his  age. 
But  in  his  own  age  he  is  a  living  nucleus.  Ideas 
are  "about."  The  great  thinker  of  the  age 
gathers  them,  focusses  light  on  them,  sifts  them, 
codifies  them,  and  makes  them  accessible  to  all. 
In  one  sense  the  thought  of  the  present  age  is  a 
revival  of  the  thought  of  Christ,  that  we  shall 
look  neither  here  nor  there,  for  the  Kingdom  of 
Heaven  is  within.  "Christian  Science"  accepts 
it  unquestioningly  as  such,  and  Christian  Science, 
with  its  fundamental  conception  of  "error  of 
mortal  mind,"  prepares  the  minds  of  millions  for 
the  work  of  Bergson.  Glimpses  of  a  tendency 
appear  here  and  there  throughout  the  centuries, 
long  before  the  current  sets  definitely  east  or 
west.  The  life-rule  of  the  Stoics  reiterates 
"that  the  view  taken  is  everything,"  "that  man's 
soul  does  violence  to  itself  when  it  makes  itself  a 
tumor  and  excrescence  on  the  universe."  "Evil 
for  you,"  says  Marcus  Aurelius,  "lies  not  in  any, 
self  external  to  your  own,  nor  yet  in  any  phase 
or  alteration  of  your  material  shell.  Where  is  it, 
then?  In  that  part  of  you  which  forms  your 


MONTESSORI  AND  BERGSON  95 

views  of  what  is  evil.    Refuse  the  view,  and  all 
is  well." 

It  is  never  easy  to  expound  the  commonly 
acceptable  philosophy  of  the  day.  Probably 
many  children  and  many  unsophisticated  persons 
"have"  it,  and  have  always  had  it.  But  the 
unsophisticated  are  often  also  the  inarticulate. 
Such  clues  to  the  living  of  life  as  they  possess  do 
not  get  beyond  themselves.  In  learning  to  be 
articulate  we  learn  only  too  easily  to  be  sophisti- 
cated. Emerson  has  a  tale  of  a  man  who,  ostensi- 
bly free,  was  actually  chained  by  the  leg  to  his 
household  furniture.  Pascal  includes  ffles  logi- 
ciens"  among  the  people  who,  wise  in  their  own 
conceits,  forget  that  an  ever-present  God  is 
creating  the  world.  "Culture  ought  to  set  people 
free,"  Signorina  Maccheroni  said  to  me  the  other 
day,  "but  most  of  the  learned  people  I  know 
seem  to  go  about  with  their  learning  laden  on 
top  of  them  so  that  they  can  hardly  walk  and 
certainly  cannot  see.  Professors  of  the  humani- 
ties come  into  our  schools,  but  I  find  that  they 
are  so  convinced  that  they  know  all  about  the 
dispositions  (attitudine)  of  human  nature  that 
they  do  not  really  observe  human  nature  at  all." 
Dr.  Montessori  has  described  the  situation  to  me 
thus:  that  the  children  are  running  about  on  their 
feet  but  that  as  we  grow  older  we  educate  our- 


96  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

selves,  laboriously,  to  stand  on  our  heads  and  to 
look  at  everything  upside  down. 

Our  difficulties,  according  to  Bergson,  arise 
from  the  "desire  to  endow  duration  with  the 
same  attributes  as  extensity,  to  interpret  a  suc- 
cession by  a  simultaneity,  and  to  express  the  idea 
of  freedom  in  a  language  in  which  it  is  untrans- 
latable." "Intensity,  duration,  voluntary  deter- 
mination have  to  be  clarified  by  ridding  them  of 
all  that  they  owe  to  the  obsession  of  the  idea  of 
space."  The  origin  of  this  obsession  is  utilitarian. 
The  illusory  distinction  and  solidification  that  we 
give  to  conscious  states  "enables  us  to  give  them 
fixed  names  in  spite  of  their  instability,  and  dis- 
tinct ones  in  spite  of  their  interpretation.  It 
enables  us  to  objectify  them,  to  throw  them  out 
into  the  current  of  social  life."  In  the  process 
of  ages  it  has  come  to  this — that  we  neglect  the 
reality  and  build  up  a  life  which  is  an  elaborate 
juggling  with  simulacra. 

"The  moments  at  which  we  grasp  ourselves 
are  rare,  and  that  is  why  we  are  rarely  free. 
The  greater  part  of  the  time  we  live  outside 
ourselves,  hardly  perceiving  anything  of  our- 
selves but  our  own  ghost,  a  colorless  shadow 
which  pure  duration  projects  into  homogeneous 
space.  Hence  our  life  unfolds  in  space  rather 
than  in  time :  we  live  for  the  external  world  rather 
than  for  ourselves;  we  speak  rather  than  think; 


MONTESSORI  AND  BERGSON  97 

we  'are  acted*  rather  than  act  ourselves.  To 
act  freely  is  to  recover  possession  of  oneself, 
and  to  get  back  into  pure  duration." 

Just  as  the  Christian  Scientists,  when  they 
succeed  in  grasping  the  principle  of  "error  of 
mortal  mind,"  find  themselves  immediately  freer 
and  less  hampered  in  their  ethical  and  even  in 
their  physical  life,  so  psycho-analysis  aims,  by 
every  means  in  its  power,  at  getting  rid  of 
mental  obsessions.  Dejerine  has  said,  in  so  many 
words,  that  the  deterministic  outlook  on  life,  due 
to  a  wrong  mental  make-up,  is  at  the  bottom  of 
nearly  all  the  human  misery  he  has  seen.  In  a 
system  of  thought  which  is  artificial  discrepancies 
must  inevitably  arise  which  baffle  men  and  often 
drive  them  to  despair.  But,  as  Bergson  says, 
we  are  free,  whenever  we  are  willing,  to  get  back 
into  ourselves,  although  it  seldom  happens  that 
we  are  willing.  "By  merely  getting  rid  of  the 
clumsy  symbols  round  which  we  are  fighting  we 
might  bring  the  fight  to  an  end." 

The  Montessori  method  insists  that  the  very 
young  child  shall  be  put  face  to  face  with  cir- 
cumstance, and  not  with  current  interpretation 
of  circumstance.  It  is  to  rediscover  the  world 
and  mint  the  coin  of  symbolism  for  itself.  Our 
common  interpretation  of  phenomena  is  not  to 
be  imposed  on  the  child  as  gospel,  as  has  been 


98  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

done  hitherto.  The  way  to  study  house-construc- 
tion, Dr.  Montessori  said  a  few  days  ago  at  St. 
Bride's,  is  to  assist  at  the  building,  not  to  accept 
your  house  and  then  analyze  it  as  if  such  and 
such  were  the  necessary  conditions  of  all  build- 
ing whatsoever.  So  the  child  is  to  approach 
every  subject.  It  is  to  reconstruct  knowledge 
from  primitive  material,  not  to  be  given  knowl- 
edge ready-made.  Dr.  Montessori  told  me  the 
other  day  that  she  intends  now  to  devote  herself 
to  finding  out  at  what  stage  the  adult  begins  to 
foist  adult  determinism  on  the  unsuspecting 
baby.  For  she  is  certain  that  the  relations  be- 
tween the  baby  and  life  are  much  more  perfect 
than  those  of  life  and  the  grown-up  man.  If 
every  one  agrees  in  regretting  that  children  have 
to  grow  up,  there  is  obviously  something  wrong 
with  that  growing-up  process  which  it  is  her  in- 
tention to  set  to  and  try  to  remedy.  It  seems  to 
her  that  if  the  points  are  set  right  from  the  be- 
ginning there  will  be  no  need  for  the  personality 
to  get  side-tracked.  It  should  not  be  so  very 
difficult,  as  a  little  child,  to  enter  the  Kingdom 
of  Heaven. 

In  its  objective  aspect  I  am  inclined  to  think 
that  all  this,  which  I  have  called  the  commonly 
acceptable  philosophy  of  the  day,  is  the  centering 
of  the  pendulum  of  human  culture,  which  had 
swung  to  its  limit  in  Germanism  and  turned 


MONTESSORI  AND  BERGSON  99 

back  with  the  crisis  of  the  war.  Or  rather,  prob- 
ably, the  war  and  the  end  of  Germanism  brought 
the  fact  of  the  swing-back  home  to  the  world 
at  large.  Montessori  is  working  on  lines  which 
should  eventually  make  psychotherapy  unneces- 
sary, and  Bergsonism  the  commonplace  of 
every  day.  My  friend  the  other  day  thought 
that  when  Bergson,  Jung,  and  Montessori  met 
something  astonishing  would  happen.  I  think, 
rather,  that  it  has  already  happened,  and  that 
these  three  are  making  it  known.  Montessori 
has  far  more  robust  a  faith  than  either  Freud  or 
Jung  in  what,  for  want  of  better  terms,  we  call 
God  and  goodness,  and  she  translates  her  faith 
into  works,  where  Bergson  lives  by  faith  alone. 
She,  putting  into  daily  practice  what  the  others 
are  indicating,  appears  to  me  to  embody  more 
than  any  other  one  person  the  momentum  of  the 
swing. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

TRAINING  FOE  CITIZENSHIP 

THE  formula  to  which  the  general  public  (as 
distinguished  from  the  teaching  profession,  which 
by  this  time  knows  better)  has  reduced  the  Mon- 
tessori  method  is  this:  "Oh,  yes,  those  are  the 
schools  where  the  children  run  the  show."  To 
ascribe  the  invention  of  school-Bolshevism  to  a 
Roman  of  the  Romans  shows  lack  of  historical 
sense.  Yet  newspapers  find  inexhaustible  copy 
in  this  notion:  Pimch  does  not  tire  of  it,  and  the 
"popular  comic"  spreads  itself  weekly,  with 
drawings  of  the  things  that  children  in  a  self- 
determined  state  would  do.  The  public  follows 
up  its  first  generalization  with  the  general  com- 
ment that  it  "doesn't  see  how  that  sort  of  thing 
is  going  to  work."  Dr.  Montessori  assures  them, 
once  for  all,  that  it  would  not.  Infant  self- 
government  never  does  work,  in  Russia  or  any- 
where else.  "You  might  as  well  throw  new-born 
babies  into  a  pond,"  Dr.  Montessori  says,  "and 
expect  them  to  swim." 

Although  the  ideal  of  the  Montessori  schools 

100 


TRAINING  FOR 

&  to  any  one  who  knows  them  recognizably  the 
liberal  idea  of  our  own  public  schools  and  older 
universities — the  algebraical  rather  than  the 
arithmetical  ideal,  the  working  up  to  a  quantity 
unknown — yet  Dr.  Montessori's  criticism  of 
public  school  methods,  in  so  far  as  she  has  seen 
them,  is  that  the  children  are  not  quite  suffi- 
ciently cared  for — in  some  matters  they  are  too 
much  "on  their  own."  She  has  nothing  but  ap- 
proval for  debating-societies  such  as  exist  in 
most  of  our  public  schools.  She  thinks  that 
school  children  ought  to  read  the  newspaper  and 
know  what  is  happening  in  the  world.  But  as 
for  the  type  of  school,  popular  in  America,  where 
imitations  of  Courts  of  Justice  and  other  social 
institutions  are  introduced,  she  said  to  me  the 
other  day  that  though  it  is  not  the  duty  of  the 
adult  to  develop  the  child,  it  is  his  duty  to  safe- 
guard the  child's  development.  To  force  moral 
responsibility  for  the  acts  of  others  upon  a 
young,  unorganized,  undeveloped  creature  is  to 
stunt  that  young  life  as  surely  as  if  we  forced 
it  into  child-labor.  Early  familiarization  with 
political  technique  is  merely  "vocational  train- 
ing." The  embryology  of  sociology  is  not  so 
simple,  social  proficiency  is  not  so  easily  incul- 
cated, as  the  "learning  by  doing"  school  believe. 
If  man  were  not,  fortunately,  just  by  nature, 
he  would  not  become  just  by  practicing  law  in 


THE  NSW  CHILDREN 

school,  any  more  than  an  unborn  mammal  learns 
to  live  in  air  by  practicing  breathing  in  its 
mother's  womb. 

This  linking  up  of  the  school  and  the  parish 
pump  is  distinctively  German.  It  has  nothing 
to  do  with  an  enlightened  regionalism,  such  as  is 
gaining  ground  in  Wales  to-day.  Whatever  the 
faults  of  our  public  schools,  they  produce  colon- 
izers. But  the  German  Empire  went  to  pieces 
on  the  rock  of  illiberality  and  parochialism.  The 
German  psychology,  nursed,  if  not  on  the  doc- 
trines of  Herbart,  at  any  rate  on  the  practice 
of  his  followers,  grew  more  and  more  self-con- 
tained and  utilitarian  till  finally  it  was  thrown 
out  from  the  main  stream  of  duration,  as  round 
and  as  dead  as  the  moon.  We  can  see  this  now, 
since  Germany  gave  herself  away,  and  the  neces- 
sity of  opposing  her  ran  through  the  turbid  in- 
definite life  of  the  nations  like  an  electric  current, 
separating  the  German  from  the  non-German, 
the  possible  from  the  not  to  be  done.  In  the 
same  way,  one  can  see  now  that  much  of  our  past 
educational  doctrine  was  "made  in  Germany" — 
that  it  was  "etatisme,"  the  subjugation  of  the 
living  spirit  to  a  certain  conventional  representa- 
tion of  things  as  they  are  not.  Herbart  himself 
believed  moral  character  to  be  a  growth  arising 
from  the  soil  of  social  experience,  not  a  faculty 
born  in  us.  Herbart's  follower  Rein  proclaimed 


TRAINING  FOR  CITIZENSHIP  103 

definitely  that  "the  development  of  the  individual 
is  nourished  in  the  development  of  the  whole." 
"We  get  no  moral  ideals,  no  moral  standards," 
said  Dewey,  writing  before  the  war,  "excepting 
as  we  interpret  these  in  social  terms." 

The  swing-back  from  Germanism  is  a  thing 
to  be  intuitively  felt  in  the  life  around  us  to-day, 
if  the  schools  have  not  reached  it.  The  pyro- 
technics of  Bergson,  who  embodies  the  negation 
of  Germanism  more  than  any  one  living  writer 
except,  perhaps,  Dr.  Montessori  herself,  all 
illuminate  one  central  theme — that  man  is  man 
first  and  a  trade  unionist  after ;  that  we  are  dead 
except  in  so  far  as  we  hold  direct  from  God.  To 
the  Antonines,  eighteen  hundred  years  ago,  the 
first  social  duty  was  "to  keep  the  god  implanted 
in  the  breast  unsoiled,"  to  "walk  as  a  follower  of 
the  ordinance  of  the  city  and  commonwealth 
most  high."  The  clue  to  right  government  was 
in  prayer,  rather  than  in  the  Forum.  "In  all 
things  call  upon  the  gods,"  says  the  Dial  of 
Princes,  "and  trouble  not  over  the  time  it  occu- 
pies. Three  hours  so  spent  avail." 

Dr.  Montessori  has  explained  to  me  her  con- 
ception of  patriotism.  "Dependence  is  not  pa- 
triotism," she  said.  "A  man  does  not  love  his 
mother  if  he  hangs  about  her  to  the  point  of 
burdening  her  with  a  weak,  feckless  son."  The 
true  social  virtue  is  to  learn  first  to  walk  with 


104  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

God,  and  with  man  singly,  and  after  that  to 
study  the  technique  of  our  social  order,  which  is 
obviously  imperfect.  Patria  is  less  an  immense 
cooperative  association  than  the  sum  of  the  god- 
liness,of  her  sons.  When  we  are  all  as  simple  and 
good  as  Christ  was — and  as  normal  children  are 
and  might  continue  to  be — social  order  will  fol- 
low as  a  by-product.  The  technique  can  be  learnt 
when  we  are  grown  up. 

In  the  educational  world  the  cry  of  anarchy 
and  Bolshevism  was  only  for  a  short  time  raised 
against  the  Montessori  method.  When  the  facts 
did  not  justify  it,  and  order,  industry,  and  sweet 
reasonableness  were  found  to  accompany  the 
work  of  the  Montessori  schools — when,  more- 
over, the  "Montessori  children"  were  found  to  be 
more  amenable  at  home  than  other  children — 
educational  criticism  swung  round  to  the  other 
extreme.  The  catchword  "suggestion"  was 
raised,  and  many  who  did  not  understand  child- 
psychology  began  to  suspect  indirect,  "hypnotic," 
possibly  occult  adult  control.  The  fact  that  life 
is  naturally  "good"  if  not  let  and  hindered;  that 
the  child  is  a  natural  worker,  a  naturally  social 
b^ing,  a  natural  seeker  after  truth,  did  not  occur 
to  the  critics.  They  argued  back  inevitably  to 
the  types  of  children  they  had  seen.  "I  have 
never  yet  succeeded,"  Dr.  Montessori  says,  "in 
convincing  any  one  by  word  of  mouth.  I  think 


TRAINING  FOR  CITIZENSHIP  105 

some  new  form  of  language  will  have  to  be 
developed  to  express  this  new  phenomenon. 
Fortunately  the  children  are  there,  behaving  as 
I  say  they  behave,  and  people  who  do  not  believe 
me  can  go  down  into  the  schools  and  see!  But 
then  there  is  the  difficulty,  with  so  much  oppo- 
sition, of  establishing  the  proper  school  condi- 
tions where  these  things  can  happen!  Nobody 
likes  me  any  more  than  they  do  any  other  con- 
structive worker  in  education,  because  it  is  a  good 
deal  of  trouble  to  reconstruct.  At  the  same  time 
almost  every  one  agrees,  instinctively,  with  a  fine 
piece  of  destructive  criticism,  like  that  of  Mr. 
Edmond  Holmes."  In  fact,  when  conferences 
are  held  and  articles  written  to  consider  educa- 
tion from  a  destructive  point  of  view,  people 
say  that  of  course  this  is  all  true,  but  it  is  noth- 
ing new.  When  the  new  is  provided  they  will 
not  try  it,  because  it  might  be  wrong.  The  fear 
of  the  new  is  easily  linked  up  with  any  other 
prevalent  phobia,  from  witchcraft  to  Popery. 

The  kind  and  degree  of  freedom  that  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori  has  found  necessary  for  children's  de- 
velopment is,  in  fact,  very  difficult  to  describe. 
Miss  Booth,  who  formerly  directed  the  Mon- 
tessori  Society's  demonstration  school,  told  me 
then  that  the  first  requisite  of  a  Montessori 
teacher  is  live  judgment,  and  I  am  afraid  that  a 
good  deal  of  the  trouble  with  the  Montessori 


106  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

method  on  the  part  of  teachers  is  that  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori  is  a  kinetic,  not  a  static,  conception  of 
school  life.  There  is  apparently  little  to  "get 
hold  of";  no  solid  immovable  framework  of 
prizes,  punishments,  and  rules.  The  Montessori 
conception  of  the  duty  of  the  adult  mind  to  the 
child  mind  is  probably  more  intelligible  to  a 
woman  than  to  a  man.  "We  await,"  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori says,  "the  successsive  births  in  the  soul 
of  the  child.  We  give  all  possible  material,  that 
nothing  may  lack  to  the  groping  soul,  and  then 
we  watch  for  the  perfect  faculty  to  come,  safe- 
guarding the  child  from  interruption  so  that  it 
may  carry  its  efforts  through."  The  older  gen- 
eration, in  fact,  must  not  meddle  with  child-life, 
any  more  than  an  expectant  mother  meddles 
with  embryonic  life.  At  the  same  time  the 
grown-up  is  indispensable,  must  provide  the 
wherewithal  and  must  be,  like  the  mother,  very 
much  there  indeed.  Since  the  whole  tissue  of 
the  school  life  is  alive  and  mobile,  the  teacher 
has  to  be  alive  with  the  rest. 

The  public  lecture  at  the  Central  Hall  ended 
,pn  one  of  those  fine  points  of  psychology  which 
hardly  any  one  before  now  has  taken  the  trouble 
to  expound. 

"The  person  who  is  developing  freely  and 
naturally,"  Dr.  Montessori  said,  "arrives  at  a 


TRAINING  FOR  CITIZENSHIP  107 

spiritual  equilibrium,  in  which  he  is  master  of  his 
actions,  just  as  one  who  has  acquired  physical 
poise  can  move  freely.  When  he  is  master  of 
himself  he  is  also  flexible  in  his  attitude  towards 
others,  and  capable  of  adaptation  to  the  wishes 
and  requirements  of  others,  and  of  'give  and 
take.'  In  this  consists  the  discipline  of  our  own 
schools.  Quest'  anima  ordinata  in  se  stessa  e  un* 
anima  ordinata,  e  non  ha  bisogno  di  una  disciplina 
esterna.  Hitherto  man  has  connected  the  word 
'discipline'  with  the  idea  of  mastery  by  some  one 
else.  Thence  we  have  come  to  think  that  the 
'free'  child  must  be  a  child  abandoned  to  its  own 
devices.  But  this  is  not  so.  When  the  order  is 
not  imposed  from  without,  but  formed  naturally 
from  within,  discipline  and  liberty  are  identical. 
As  the  soul  of  man  advances  in  this  inner 
discipline,  so  much  the  freer  is  it  to  develop  and 
expand." 

Speaking  to  those  gathered  to  welcome  her  at 
St.  George's  Harpenden,  Dr.  Montessori  re- 
minded them  that  the  baby  is  not  an  adult,  and 
baby  liberty  is  not  adult  liberty. 

"A  person  with  vague  ideas  about  liberty 
might  conceivably  be  sorry  for  a  fish  because  it 
was  in  the  water  or  for  a  plant  because  it  was 
rooted  in  the  ground.  But  the  fish  would  be  no 
better  off  if  it  were  taken  out  to  enjoy  the  air. 
So,  if  we  have  mistaken  ideas  about  liberty,  we 
may  deprive  the  human  spirit  of  things  that  are 
necessary  to  its  life,  and  in  this  way  be  causing 


108  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

death.  Every  living  being  has  its  own  type  of 
liberty,  and  all  we  can  do  is  to  watch,  to  provide, 
and  to  help  each  to  live  according  to  its  needs. 
We  shall  not  be  giving  the  human  child  liberty 
if  we  simply  let  it  loose  to  run  in  the  fields  like 
an  animal.  This  kind  of  liberty  is  too  limited 
for  man.  We  can  give  the  child  freedom  by 
providing  it  with  the  means  of  development,  and 
by  removing  obstacles  to  development — remov- 
ing our  own  preconceptions  also,  in  so  far  as  they 
are  stumbling-blocks  to  the  child.  The  first  thing 
we  must  do,  to  this  end,  is  to  learn  humility. 
We  must  not  consider  ourselves  either  as  crea- 
tors of  the  children  or  as  models  for  the  children 
to  imitate,  but  only  as  ever-ready  comforters  and 
helpers  of  these  little  souls,  patiently  striving 
towards  the  light." 

Some  of  the  public  opposition  to  the  method 
of  liberty  is  based  on  the  argument  that  we,  the 
present  generation,  did  very  well  without.  But 
Dr.  Montessori  convinces  her  students  of  adult 
clumsiness  and  helplessness  in  a  very  disconcert- 
ing way  by  putting  them  through  the  same  deli- 
cate operations  that  the  children,  and  especially 
the  Italian  children,  with  their  racial  mobility 
and  vivacity,  perform  so  easily  and  so  well. 

"The  first  time  we  did  this,  with  the  exercises 
for  dramatic  interpretation,  the  result  astonished 
us  all;  the  torpid  movements  of  the  grown-ups, 
the  lack  of  grace,  the  almost  complete  incapacity 


TRAINING  FOR  CITIZENSHIP  109 

to  give  expression  to  the  face.  This  made  us 
realize,  indeed,  that  we  have  lost  something  upon 
the  path  of  life." 

I  heard  Dr.  Montessori  describing  this  experi- 
ment in  the  course  of  a  lecture  at  St.  Bride's, 
and  at  this  point  she  stopped  and  looked  at  us 
all  for  a  long  time,  reflectively. 

"There  is  no  doubt,"  she  continued,  "that  our 
faces  are  less  beautiful  and  less  expressive  than 
they  might  be.  The  whole  of  our  personality 
resembles  that  of  heavy  animals  who  carry  their 
bodies  from  place  to  place,  who  have  no  other 
mission  than  to  transport  their  bodies." 


CHAPTER  XIV 

TRAINING  FOR  VISION 

IT  is  sometimes  urged  against  the  Montessori 
method  that  it  does  not  make  enough  provision 
for  creative  work,  for  art,  and  poetry,  and  the 
handicrafts.  Dr.  Montessori  wrings  her  hands 
in  despair  over  the  stupidity  of  this  criticism, 
for  it  is  to  these  very  ends,  above  all,  that  the 
method  leads.  "How  can  any  one  paint,"  she 
says,  "who  cannot  grade  colors?  How  can  any 
one  write  poetry  who  has  not  learnt  to  hear  and 
see?"  Another  time  she  said  to  me,  "Per  poter 
spendere  bisogna  prima  guadagnare."  In  order 
to  give  back  anything  to  the  world  one  must  first 
take  in  nourishment  from  the  world.  No  one 
can  work  on  an  empty  stomach,  and  no  one  can 
produce  literature  on  an  empty  brain. 

Prof.  Foster  Watson  told  me  that  it  was  his 
feeling  that  in  education  a  child  ought  to  have 
the  chance  of  being  "all  over  everything":  see- 
ing, feeling,  tasting,  and  experiencing  every 
variety  of  material  out  of  which  the  world  is 
made.  He  had  had  some  little  doubt  as  to 

no 


TRAINING  FOR  VISION  111 

whether,  in  the  Montessori  school,  they  would 
be  enough  of  this  eclecticism.  I  believe  I  con- 
vinced him  that  there  was  no  fear  of  any  kind  of 
narrowness,  and  I  do  not  think  that  any  one  will 
fear  it  who  intimately  knows  any  "Montessori 
child." 

I  watched  a  five-year-old  Montessori  child 
once  come  into  a  room,  where  a  new  and  elaborate 
brass  bedstead  had  been  set  up,  which  he  had 
not  seen.  The  little  boy  quickly  set  to  work 
and  climbed  all  over  the  bedstead.  He  ran  one 
finger  round  all  the  outlines  of  the  ornamenta- 
tion: he  spent  a  long  time  watching  the  play  of 
light  on  the  mother-of-pearl  with  which  it  was 
inlaid.  He  counted  the  little  knobs  and  the  big 
knobs  and  compared  the  sizes  of  them  with  each 
other.  At  last  he  inserted  himself  between  the 
bed  and  the  wall  and  squeezed  himself  round  it 
as  far  as  he  could  go,  and  only  then  woke  up  to 
the  fact  that  he  was  being  observed,  and  began 
to  laugh. 

Then  he  went  to  the  window  and  reported 
that  it  was  a  misty  day.  Quite  close,  he  said, 
you  could  see  through  the  mist,  but  a  little  way 
off  you  could  not  see  through  it.  First  the  trees 
were  rather  blue  and  then  they  were  quite  gray; 
and  then  where  there  ought  to  be  hills  there  were 
none.  Up  among  the  blue  trees  some  one  must 


THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

be  burning  something,  because  there  was  a  big 
piece  of  smoke.  Somewhere  down  the  road  there 
was  a  doggie  barking,  and  somewhere  up  the 
road  there  was  somebody  making  an  iron  hoop 
run  along  on  the  path.  How  did  he  know  it  was 
a  hoop?  Could  he  see  it?  No,  he  "beared"  it.  It 
was  an  iron  noise.  Up  against  the  trees  the 
smoke  from  the  chimneys  was  white  and  rather 
blue,  and  up  against  the  sky  it  was  rather  black 
— no,  rather  browny.  For  more  than  half  an 
hour  he  stayed  at  the  window,  obligingly  report- 
ing the  news  of  the  morning  to  his  grown-up 
friend  who  was  having  breakfast  in  bed. 

Later,  his  grown-up  friends  used  to  avoid  go- 
ing down  the  High  Street  with  him  if  they  were 
in  anything  of  a  hurry,  because  there  were  so 
many  entrancing  varieties  of  alphabets  to  be 
studied  on  the  sign-boards  over  the  shops.  At 
that  period  he  got  hold  of  a  Greek  text-book  and 
was  unwearying  in  turning  it  over  and  sorting 
out  the  English  type  from  the  Greek.  "Isn't 
it  funny,"  he  would  call  out  joyfully  from  the 
low  branches  of  a  beech-tree  that  he  was  climb- 
ing, "how  you  can  make  three  kinds  of  little 
printing  g's?" 

At  about  the  same  time  the  developing  talk 
of  his  baby  sister  began  to  attract  his  attention, 
so  that  whenever  he  was  parted  from  her  he 


TRAINING  FOR  VISION  113 

wished  afterwards  to  be  told  every  word  that 
she  had  said.  As  he  lay  in  his  cot,  before  going 
to  sleep,  he  murmured  scales  to  himself,  and 
octaves,  and  thirds,  and  fifths.  I  have  always, 
in  thinking  of  that  little  friend  of  mine,  thought 
of  Stevenson's  line: 

"T}he  world  is  so  full  of  a  number  of  things." 

Here,  at  any  rate,  was  some  one  who  was  far  too 
busy  to  be  naughty:  as  busy  as  a  bee  and  as 
happy  as  a  hundred  kings.  "What  do  the  French 
people  say  for  'the'?"  he  would  say,  as  one  went 
to  tuck  him  up.  "Lefle!  Funny,  isn't  it?  Why 
do  they  do  it?"  and  would  turn  over  contentedly 
—"God  bless  you" — and  go  to  sleep  for  eleven 
hours. 

It  was  after  going  for  a  walk  with  him  that 
I  wrote  the  following  account  of  what  we  saw, 
and  put  it  into  the  mouth  of  an  imaginary  teacher 
with  an  imaginary  dozen  or  so  little  pupils  like 
him. 

"The  school  is  on  the  edge  of  a  wood :  in  the 
heart  of  the  wood  are  a  couple  of  lakes.  Fuel 
is  scarce  this  autumn,  and  the  authorities  have 
decided  that  the  bakers  have  first  claim.  So 
that,  as  there  is  not  enough  firing  to  go  around 
all  the  departments,  the  infants'  class,  which  is  a 
Montessori  class  and  has  also  been  to  some  extent 


THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

an  open-air  class  all  the  summer,  is  setting  a 
Spartan  example  to  the  rest.  The  infants  are 
glad,  because  it  takes  them  out  into  the  woods, 
where  odd  things  are  happening,  whilst  the  older 
children  nurse  chilblains  and  are  scolded  by  the 
teachers  for  stamping  their  feet. 

"There  has  been  no  systematic  study  of  nature 
in  this  class  as  interpreted  by  object-lessons  and 
explanations.  But  all  the  children's  work  has 
gone  to  the  developing  of  sharp  ears  and  seeing 
eyes,  and  to  the  noticing  of  almost  imperceptible 
differences.  To-day,  when  winter  has  suddenly 
sprung  upon  autumn,  there  are  so  many  differ- 
ences between  to-day  and  yesterday  that  the 
teacher  is  almost  pulled  to  pieces  by  the  children, 
who  drag  her  hither  and  thither,  impatient  to 
make  her  see  what  they  have  seen. 

"On  the  lower  lake  there  was,  overnight,  a 
film  of  ice.  In  the  south-west  corner  there  is 
a  little  bay,  and  in  the  bay  the  ice  has  remained. 
At  the  mouth  of  the  bay  broken  ice  is  grating 
and  screaming  in  the  teeth  of  a  cruel  north- 
easter, which  has  driven  the  open  surface  of  the 
lake  into  waves.  The  teacher  thinks  to  herself 
that  just  such  conditions  must  prevail  in  the 
frozen  ports  of  the  North  of  Europe,  where 
winter  has  long  since  set  in.  But  she  does  not 
say  so,  for  to  five-year-olds  and  six-year-olds 
Europe  itself  is  hardly  more  than  a  word,  and 
she  has  learnt  to  think  that  one  should  begin 
to  understand  a  thing  first  and  name  it  after- 
wards. 

"Moreover,  the  children  are  all  taken  up  in 


TRAINING  FOR  VISION  115 

laughing  and  jumping  with  excitement  over 
something  that  one  of  them  has  seen.  The 
waves  beyond  the  broken  ice  are  waves  of  leaves. 
The  dead  leaves,  not  yet  cockled  and  brittle, 
have  been  swept  by  the  wind  into  this  corner, 
just  as  in  class  we  sweep  a  handful  of  confetti 
together  with  the  broom.  Thick  on  the  surface 
of  the  water  they  are  surging  up  and  down  in 
wave-shapes  like  a  canvas  sea. 

"This  is  too  soon  to  begin  telling  such  little 
children  anything  of  what  science  has  put  to- 
gether about  wave-formation;  moreover,  at  this 
stage,  the  children  do  not  want  to  know.  They 
only  want  to  look,  and  look  again,  and  make 
what  is  happening  around  and  about  them  their 
own,  a  part  of  themselves.  They  run  and  jump, 
crackling  the  frozen  leaves  on  the  shore  edge  of 
the  little  bay,  and  under  the  frozen  surface  of  the 
water  they  discover  that  there  are  leaves  again, 
pressed  up  by  the  force  of  the  water,  and  flat- 
tened down  by  the  sheet  of  ice,  like  the  prepara- 
tions for  the  microscope  which  they  will  meet 
some  day. 

"Under  the  ice  are  big  white  patches,  and 
speculation  arises  among  them  as  to  what  these 
may  be.  So  the  teacher  chooses  one  near  the 
edge,  where  the  ice  is  already  rough  and  uneven, 
and  drops  a  big  stone  into  it,  so  that  the  children 
can  see  the  whiteness  slowly  bubbling  itself  out 
through  the  hole  that  the  stone  has  made.  The 
children  do  not  throw  any  more  stones,  because 
the  teacher  says  it  would  spoil  the  ice,  and  they 
have  a  general  habit  of  taking  care  of  things. 


116  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

Moreover,  when  somebody  spoiled  this  particular 
ice  last  winter  there  was  trouble,  and  the  Crown 
— that  mysterious  being  to  whom  the  lake 
belongs,  and  who  lets  the  town  skate  on  it — was 
not  pleased,  and  if  it  was  done  again  might  even 
prevent  the  children  from  coming  here. 

"After  a  while  a  general  wish  comes  to  see 
what  is  doing  on  the  upper  lake.  To  get  there 
one  has  to  go  all  round  the  lower,  wind-swept 
lake,  and  the  children  remember  that  on  the 
northern  shore  a  great  belt  of  trees  has  been 
cut  down.  The  children  saw  the  German  pris- 
oners going  in  lorry-loads  to  do  the  felling;  this 
summer  there  was  a  Canadian  forestry  corps 
encamped  in  the  woods.  Now  the  place  that 
was  wood  is  all  clear — even  the  stumps  and  roots 
that  were  standing  about  on  their  heads  all  over 
the  clearing  are  gone ;  and  this  is  why  the  north- 
easterly wind  is  ruffling  the  lake. 

"The  upper  lake  is  always  a  still,  shrouded 
pool.  Nobody  boats  on  it;  it  is  not  weeded; 
will-o'-the-wisps  haunt  it;  the  trees  press  high 
and  close  around  it,  making  dense  shelter  and 
shade.  On  this  lake  the  whole  skin  of  ice  is 
intact.  All  over  the  surface  of  the  ice  fallen 
leaves  are  scudding,  advancing  from  shore  to 
shore  in  companies  and  battalions,  turning,  re- 
treating, returning  whence  they  came.  Dust- 
devils  and  whirlpools  and  waterspouts  of  leaves 
form  and  unform  themselves;  all  at  incredible 
speed;  the  air  filled  and  reechoing  with  their 
light,  dry,  tinkling  song.  The  children  are 
enchanted — never  did  human  beings  skate  like 


TRAINING  FOR  VISION  117 

this.  On  this  lake  no  one  ever  skates,  for  there 
are  currents  which  make  the  ice  treacherous. 
So  here  the  teacher  and  the  children  all  take  fir- 
cones and  send  them  flying  and  skimming  across 
the  ice.  As  they  go  they  make  a  ringing  sound, 
which  echoes  from  the  wall  of  trees.  When 
stones  are  thrown  instead  the  noise  is  much 
louder,  rising  almost  to  a  scream.  The  children 
at  this  age  are  impatient  of  explanations.  But 
the  teacher  is  convinced  that  they  see  and  hear 
far  more  than  she  does — a  million  invisible,  in- 
audible things.  When  the  half-gods  go,  the  gods 
arrive.  Fairy-tales  lose  some  of  their  force 
when  the  children  come  to  life  and  become  fairies 
themselves." 

There  are  people  who  think  that  the  Montes- 
sori  schools  will  not  teach  enough,  and  there  are 
also  people  who  fear  that  they  will  teach  too 
much.  "These  delicate  brains  that  you  are  train- 
ing," said  a  French  gentleman  to  Dr.  Montes- 
sori,  " these  fine  ears,  attuned  to  every  faintest 
sound:  how  will  they  ever  learn  to  support  the 
uproar  of  our  Paris  streets?"  "My  dear  sir," 
replied  Dr.  Montessori,  "they  will  learn  to  sup- 
port it  by  walking  through  the  streets  of  Paris 
twice  a  day,  on  their  way  to  school  and  on  their 
way  back  from  school."  Children  are  better  able 
to  take  care  of  their  faculties  than  we  imagine, 
and  we  need  not  fear  to  be  over-refining  them  by 
making  them  alive  and  sensitive  to  all  that  they 


118  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

hear  and  see.  The  child  who  is  awake  to  move- 
ment and  color  and  texture  and  sky  and  wind 
and  stars  will  not  be  starved  of  nature  even  in 
a  city  slum. 


CHAPTER  XV 

LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

IN  a  series  of  Monday  lectures  at  St.  Bride's 
Institute  from  September  to  late  December, 
1919,  Dr.  Montessori  developed,  for  the  benefit 
of  the  students  of  her  training  course,  what  is 
likely  to  be  a  final  settlement  of  the  age-long 
controversy  about  "liberal  education."  She 
solves  it  as  Aristotle  solved  it,  and  as  the  Labor 
Party  in  England,  with  its  clear  vision  of  the 
uselessness  of  the  utilitarianism  that  we  imported 
ready-made  from  Germany,  is  solving  it  to-day. 
Education  must  be  super-civic,  and  must  aim  at 
no  stated  end.  As  Dr.  Montessori  said  a  few 
days  ago,  answering  the  question  that  is  inces- 
santly put  to  her  about  English  versus  Italian 
children : 

"There  are  things — roots  of  the  construction 
of  the  mind — which  are  common  to  all  mankind. 
What  I  have  developed  in  my  method  serves 
these  fundamental  needs.  In  fact,  this  method 
does  not  touch  upon  any  particular.  Whether 
the  children  we  are  dealing  with  have  a  special 

119 


120  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

country,  special  national  customs,  does  not  come 
within  the  range  of  this  that  I  have  done." 

The  test  of  a  liberal  education,  according  to 
Dr.  Montessori,  does  not  consist  in  what  is  done 
in  the  schools,  but  in  the  way  in  which,  and  the 
motive  for  which,  it  is  done.  She  revolves  into 
a  unity  the  fallacious  dualism  of  the  Gymnasium 
and  the  Realschule,  of  the  Realgymnasium  and 
the  Technische  Hochschule.  She  has  no  mercy 
on  any  one  who  sets  out,  with  any  intentions 
whatsoever,  civic  or  otherwise,  to  tinker  a  Tell- 
mensch  out  of  what  God  intended  to  be  a  man. 
But,  in  her  system,  the  liberally  educated  man 
will  not  necessarily  be  a  "brain-worker."  In 
fact,  if  a  man  turns  out  to  be  simply  and  solely 
a  "brain-worker"  he  will  not,  according  to  her, 
be  liberally  (educated  at  all.  The  elements  of 
all  manual  activities  as  well  as  of  all  intellectual 
activities  must  enter  into  the  liberal  scheme  of 
life.  Every  school  task  must  involve  a  complete 
cycle  of  thought  and  action,  in  order  that  in 
adult  life  all  theory  shall  be  not  only  founded  on, 
but  permeated  with,  fact. 

The  seven  liberal  arts  have,  in  fact,  been 
stretched  by  Dr.  Montessori  to  include  every- 
thing that  God  has  allowed  man  to  do.  Since 
school  hours  are  limited,  the  function  of  a  school 
that  is  to  include  everything  is,  obviously,  not 


LIBERAL  EDUCATION 

to  teach  subjects,  but  to  assist  the  faculties  to 
growth.  The  Montessori  child,  with  this  ideal- 
istic education,  is  the  most  practically  efficient 
person  on  earth.  The  didactic  material  is  a  stuff 
to  try  the  soul's  strength  on,  and  the  soul  works 
not  through  the  eye  and  brain  alone.  The  en- 
gineer who  knows  no  poetry  and  the  savant 
who  cannot  light  a  fire  or  keep  his  accounts  are 
all  alike  uneducated  in  Dr.  Montessori's  eyes. 
The  intellectual,  without  the  use  of  his  hands,  is 
as  illiberally  educated  as  the  manual  laborer  who 
does  not  think.  I  discussed  this  point  with  Dr. 
Ballard,  and  he  agreed  with  me  that  it  is  prob- 
ably not  possible  to  argue  this  question  with 
any  person  in  whom  fine  skill,  of  one  kind  or 
another,  is  undeveloped,  because  the  correspond- 
ing faculty  of  mind  also  lies  dormant.  It  is 
probably  no  more  use  talking  of  craft  to  a  man 
who  is  in  no  sense  a  craftsman,  than  to  discuss 
music  with  the  stone-deaf  or  color  with  the  color- 
blind; and,  since  abstractions  have  been  to  a  great 
extent  the  bright  child's  only  food  in  school, 
nearly  every  one  who  thinks  thinks  "brainishly." 
Salvation  has  come  in  some  degree  to  a  few 
through  the  fine  use  of  language,  which  is  in 
some  sense  a  craft,  and  will  be  more  so  now,  by 
the  Montessori  grammar  system,  where  words 
acquire  an  exact  and  actual  value  for  the  child. 
The  tendency  of  all  education  hitherto  has  been 


THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

to  divide  men  into  two  classes — one  attached  to 
the  abstract,  and  the  other  to  the  concrete. 
Hence  the  gulf  between  the  man  in  coat  and  the 
man  in  shirt-sleeves.  But  to  the  child,  as  to  the 
craftsman,  abstract  and  concrete  are  one.  There 
is  no  real  dissociation,  and  there  never  need  be 
any  dissociation  for  us,  in  that  universe  which 
Bergson  has  led  us  to  conceive  of  as  an  inter- 
penetration,  which  all  our  instincts  claim  to  be  a 
unity.  As  Dr.  Ballard  said  once  to  a  gathering 
of  exclusively  literary  people,  if  manual  work  is 
so  disgusting  as  literary  people  think,  then  they 
ought  not  to  shirk  it  and  make  other  people  do 
it  for  them.  But  it  is  not.  The  child,  if  given 
the  means,  and  left  alone,  is  no  snob.  It  wants 
to  try  everything.  It  does  not  sweep  the  floor 
because  it  is  going  to  be  a  domestic  servant,  but 
because  every  one  at  some  time  needs  to  have 
swept,  if  only  to  be  able  in  the  future  to  think 
accurately  and  not  make  sweeping  assertions, 
or  believe  that  things  one  does  not  care  about  can 
be  abolished  by  sweeping  them  aside.  The  point 
of  view  of  the  person  who  does  things  is  radically 
different  from  that  of  the  person  who  does  not. 
At  the  close  of  the  third  public  lecture  at  the 
Kingsway  Hall,  Dr.  Montessori  summed  up  the 
matter  in  a  few  words: 

"Education,"   she  said,   "is  a  work  of  self- 
organization,  by  which  man  adapts  himself  to  the 


LIBERAL  EDUCATION  123 

conditions  of  life.  We  find  the  beginnings  of 
self-organization  for  the  child  in  the  works  which 
by  us  have  been  considered  to  be  the  humblest 
and  lowest  forms  of  work — the  exercises  of  prac- 
tical life,  the  putting  of  the  environment  in  order. 
These  things  coordinate  the  mind  and  fix  the 
attention  in  a  simple  manner.  They  are  a  neces- 
sary preparation  for  subsequent  constructive 
work." 


Dr.  Montessori  knows  very  well  that  all  this 
is  too  primitive  to  catch  the  attention  of  those 
psychologists  who  seek  after  complicated  things 
to  the  neglect  of  the  simple.  "Educators  ought 
surely,"  she  said  to  me  the  other  day,  "to  under- 
stand that  I,  too,  have  studied  educational 
theory  in  all  its  complexity  just  as  they  have. 
If,  in  the  end,  I  have  put  aside  the  complicated 
and  come  down  to  the  simple,  surely  any  one 
ought  to  be  able  to  see  that  it  is  because,  after  a 
lifetime  of  study,  I  am  finally  convinced  that  the 
simple  things  which  have  hitherto  been  neglected 
are  the  most  vital." 

As  an  unerring  practical  psychologist,  Dr. 
Montessori  scarcely  answers  any  of  the  current 
criticisms  of  her  method,  because  she  knows  that* 
almost  all  of  it  is  vitiated  by  the  "sedentary" 
outlook  of  the  average  person  who  writes.  She 
believes  it  to  be  a  mistake  that  the  early  training 
of  boys  and  girls  should  be  different,  and  in  her 


THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

schools  the  boys  and  girls,  equally,  share  the 
responsibility  of  the  housework,  and  the  prepara- 
tion of  meals.  She  gave  a  lecture  recently  at 
St.  Bride's,  from  which  I  gathered — though  one 
cannot  "corner"  her  on  this  subject — that  she  be- 
lieves, literally,  that  in  order  to  be  able  to  con- 
centrate fruitfully  on  any  serious  work  we  should 
all  begin  the  day — man  after  his  kind,  and 
woman  after  her  kind:  the  judge,  the  duchess, 
the  philosopher,  the  schoolboy,  the  trade  union 
leader — by  making  our  own  beds,  and  setting  our 
own  rooms  in  order.  Las  Casas  said  that  Na- 
poleon's ideal  of  national  efficiency  was  the  old 
Roman  ideal  that  every  soldier  should  have  his 
own  hand-mill  and  grind  his  own  corn.  There 
are  innumerable  politicians,  thinkers,  writers,  in 
whose  thought,  although  it  is  obviously  warped, 
it  is  almost  impossible  to  find  the  flaw — this  is  it : 
there  is  no  flaw  in  the  reasoning,  but  the  whole 
man  is  subtly  vitiated  by  the  lack  of  the  point  of 
view  which  he  lost  with  that  humble  action  that 
he  never  did,  never  even  began  to  be  able  to  do. 
One  may  think,  for  instance,  that  one  knows  the 
working  man's  point  of  view,  but  the  working 
man  knows  that  almost  no  writer  has  ever  known 
it.  The  working  man,  indeed,  suspects  writers 
of  "wangling"  all  things,  to  conclusions  which 
are  private  and  non-universal,  and,  in  revolt 
against  what  he  takes  for  a  conspiracy  on  the  part 


LIBERAL  EDUCATION  125 

of  the  writers  of  history,  is  setting  out  at  this 
moment  to  rewrite  history,  and  reconstruct  eco- 
nomics from  another  partial  point  of  view.  But 
when  the  Montessori  generation  is  grown  up, 
there  will  not  be  a  man  alive,  whether  learned 
or  unlearned,  who  depends  on  others,  who  makes 
work,  who  finds  work  irksome,  who  is  incapable 
by  his  education  of  understanding  how  another 
person  thinks  and  feels. 


CHAPTER  XVI 

A  NEW  THEORY  OF  WORK 

AMONG  Dr.  Montessori's  most  valuable  gifts 
to  the  world  has  been  her  theory  of  work,  based 
upon  observation  of  the  way  in  which  children, 
left  to  themselves,  approach  a  task  and  carry  it 
through.  In  one  of  her  lectures  to  teachers  at 
St.  Bride's  Institute,  Dr.  Montessori  said  that 
there  had  hitherto  been  in  the  world  two  prevail- 
ing conceptions  of  work.  The  one  conception  is 
to  regard  work  as  the  curse  of  Adam — a  burden 
too  heavy  for  man  to  bear ;  the  other  conception 
is  of  work  as  a  means  of  production.  The  com- 
bination of  the  two  ideas  may  be  summed  up 
in  the  text,  "in  the  sweat  of  thy  brow  shalt  thou 
eat  bread."  All  social  trouble  springs  from  this 
paradoxical  conception  of  labor  as  a  thing  neces- 
sary to  our  existences,  but  which,  at  the  same 
time,  must  be  avoided.  The  ideal  of  man  has 
become  the  acquisition  of  wealth,  so  that  he  may 
sit  in  idleness  and  cause  others  to  do  the  work 
which  he  abhors  and  finds  fatiguing.  The  ideal 
of  the  laborer  is  to  work  no  more. 

126 


A  NEW  THEORY  OF  WORK 

But  medical  investigation  of  the  phenomena 
of  fatigue  is  gradually  bringing  about  a  different 
attitude  on  the  part  of  humanity.  Illness  and 
exhaustion  have  been  found  to  arise  from  "too 
little  to  do"  more  than  from  overwork.  "Work 
plus  interest,"  or,  rather,  "work  plus  impetus," 
is  virtually  a  panacea  for  all  the  lesser  human 
ills.  So  that  we  have,  to-day,  this  third  concep- 
tion of  work  as  a  necessary  function  of  our  be- 
ing, a  thing  which  we  must  give  off  constantly 
in  order  to  keep  ourselves  in  a  state  of  health. 
All  children  tend  to  work  incessantly.  Any 
mother  knows  that  a  young  child,  as  long  as  it 
is  awake,  is  never  still.  It  is  perpetually  looking, 
perpetually  touching,  hearing,  incessantly  solv- 
ing problems.  But  it  is  all  on  a  very  minute  scale 
and  is  all,  to  us,  very  easy  and  primitive.  We 
have  to  come  down  off  our  stilts  to  realize  what 
difficulties  children  are  overcoming  every  moment 
of  their  lives. 

The  task  of  the  Montessori  school  is  to  slow 
the  child  down,  not  to  drive  it — to  give  it  easy 
steps  to  climb  instead  of  steep  ones;  peace  and 
leisure  for  climbing  them  in  the  place  of  hurry 
and  rush.  It  is  also  to  give  the  child  "heaps  to 
do."  As  Dr.  Montessori  says,  our  only  idea  of 
being  kind  to  children,  hitherto,  has  been  to  stop 
them  from  working.  But  the  child,  without  occu- 
pation, is  starved.  I  spoke  to  Dr.  Montessori  of 


128  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

the  state  of  things  that  prevails  in  Eastern  village 
life,  where  the  children  have  a  finger  in  every 
pie:  where  every  one  is  kind  to  them,  as  only 
semi-civilized  folk  are  kind :  where  all  little  boys 
play  with  their  father's  tools,  unconsciously 
learning  their  father's  trade.  "Ecco!"  she  said, 
"that  is  just  what  I  mean."  The  child  ought 
not  to  be  made  to  work,  but  it  ought  not  to  be 
shut  out  from  helping  if  it  wants  to  help.  There 
are  many  ways  in  which  little  children  can  enter 
into  the  workaday  life  of  the  kitchen,  the  garden, 
and  the  house,  but  our  tendency  to-day  is  to 
segregate  them,  to  provide  them  with  toys  and 
kindergarten  occupations,  which  have  no  sense 
in  them  and  do  not  satisfy  the  child  because  they 
have  no  sense. 

The  Montessori  apparatus  holds  the  children 
because  there  is  so  much  that  they  can  do  with 
it.  But  the  reason  why  they  want  to  do  those 
things  is  deeper  to  seek.  By  means  of  the  ap- 
paratus it  gains  powers — powers  of  vision,  of  dis- 
crimination, of  judgment  in  a  hundred  spheres, 
all  of  which  it  applies  to  the  facts  of  life:  "The 
world,"  says  Dr.  Montessori,  "which  is  much 
richer  and  more  logical  than  anything  we  can 
conceive,  will  complete  the  child's  education  for 
it."  All  art,  all  craft,  all  invention,  all  manu- 
facture, lie  ready  for  the  hand  and  brain  and 
spirit  to  exercise  themselves  as  soon  as  they  have 


A  NEW  THEORY  OF  WORK  129 

grasped  the  rudiments  of  self-organization 
through  these  simple  means  that  the  didactic  ap- 
paratus provides.  All  through  life  spontaneous 
work  is  educational,  just  as  all  education  consists 
in  spontaneous  work. 

The  whole  of  the  Montessori  method  is  per- 
meated with  the  sense  of  the  joy  of  work,  and 
also  with  the  sense  of  the  value  of  leisure.  Since 
the  children  were  free  to  do  as  they  liked,  and 
at  the  same  time  had  the  possibility  of  unlimited 
occupation,  Dr.  Montessori  was  able  to  observe 
the  evolution  of  cycles  of  work,  and  to  make 
graphs  illustrating  them,  which  are  to  be  found 
in  her  books.  An  essential  part  of  every  cycle 
of  work  is  a  period  of  what  an  untrained  teacher 
might  take  to  be  idleness,  when  the  child  sits 
about,  or  looks  out  of  the  window,  or  watches 
the  others.  As  the  work  of  a  school  steadies 
down  to  regularity,  these  work  and  rest  periods 
of  the  individual  children  steady  down  also  to 
such  a  constant  rhythm  that  experienced  teachers 
do  not  trouble,  knowing  that  presently  the  child 
will  "set  to."  Signorina  Maccheroni  has  de- 
scribed to  me  a  phenomenon  of  tension  of  waiting 
for  the  teacher  to  come  and  explain  something, 
which  she  believes  to  be  an  essential  part  of  work, 
and  one  cf  the  reasons  why  a  class  of  forty  with 
one  teacher  gives  better  results  than  a  class  of 
twenty,  with  two.  Many  of  these  observed  phe- 


130  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

nomena  are  foreign  to  the  psychology  of  educa- 
tion as  we  understand  it  to-day. 

The  children  in  the  Montessori  schools  not 
only  display  r,  great  love  of  work,  but  after  it  is 
over  are  not  tired.  A  small  child  will  go  through 
an  exercise  involving  an  immense  amount  of  con- 
centrated attention  for  its  age  and  at  the  end  will 
mix  up  the  material  and  start  working  out  the 
same  problem  again.  After  it  has  done  this 
perhaps  forty  times  it  will  sit  back  in  its  chair, 
its  face  radiant  with  satisfaction,  at  peace  with 
itself  and  all  the  world.  Then  it  will  of  its  own 
accord  put  back  the  material  in  the  cupboard, 
roll  up  the  rug  it  has  been  sitting  on  ( for  any  of 
the  work  can  be  done  sitting  or  standing  or  lying 
about,  as  the  children  prefer) — and  perhaps  be- 
gin to  help  its  neighbor,  or  run  to  the  teacher 
and  fling  its  arms  round  her  knees  in  tacit  grati- 
tude for  all  it  has  been  allowed  to  do. 

From  what  she  has  seen  in  her  schools  for  the 
last  twenty  years,  Dr.  Montessori  deduces  what 
is  also  an  established  fact  in  modern  medicine, 
that  it  is  not  work  itself,  but  the  dislike  of  work, 
that  makes  people  tired.  Mankind  has  labored 
for  centuries  under  a  curious  delusion.  Work 
has,  as  I  have  said,  been  considered  by  him  as  a 
necessary  evil,  a  means  of  producing  the  neces- 
sities of  life,  and  happiness  has  come  to  be  con- 
nected with  the  possession  of  riches,  which  will 


A  NEW  THEORY  OF  WORK  131 

enable  the  rich  man  to  make  some  one  else  do 
the  work  while  he  sits  still. 

But  modern  medicine  is  discovering  that  dis- 
ease, and  especially  nervous  disease,  is  just  as 
prevalent  amongst  the  idle  as  amongst  the  over- 
worked. The  children  in  the  Montessori  schools, 
who  work  incessantly,  are  happier  and  healthier 
than  other  children.  Apparently,  says  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori, the  truth  about  work  is  this — that  it  is 
a  simple,  natural  function,  a  thing  we  need  to 
do  in  order  to  keep  well,  just  as  we  have  to 
breathe  to  live,  and  as  our  hearts  have  to  beat. 
This  truth  is  only  beginning  to  dawn  on  the 
present  generation,  but  when  it  has  dawned  com- 
pletely there  will  be  no  more  labor  troubles,  no 
more  strikes.  The  only  unfortunate  man  will 
be  the  man  who  has  nothing  to  do.  When^work 
is  a  privilege  for  all,  no  one  will  "make  work" 
for  any  one  else.  The  well-to-do  will  no  longer 
consider  it  an  advantage  to  be  served,  nor  will 
the  poor  think  it  a  hardship  to  serve.  But  the 
day  of  all  these  wonders  is  not  yet.  Only  the 
germ  of  it  is  here  with  us  to-day  in  the  happy, 
industrious  children  of  these  schools. 

As  for  trade-unionism  and  strikes,  those  who 
can  see  the  State  schools  of  to-day  with  anything 
of  Dr.  Montessori's  clear,  far-sighted  vision  know 
that  with  our  present  methods  of  education, 
governments  in  all  countries  are  manufacturing 


132  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

trouble  for  themselves.  Psycho-analysis  has 
shown  the  inevitable  results  of  repression  and 
coercion  of  children,  however  benevolent.  Not 
by  the  mildest  of  Prussianism  can  we  bring  up 
a  generation  that  will  love  authority  and  wish 
to  cooperate  with  it  and  further  its  aims.  The 
rigidity,  moreover,  of  the  time-table  and  the  arbi- 
trariness of  the  school  curriculum  all  tend  to 
produce  a  type  of  worker  whose  interest  is  not  in 
the  work  done  but  in  the  time  which  it  takes  to 
do  it.  When  the  class  is  over,  the  work  is  put 
away,  however  much  any  boy  or  girl  may  be 
interested  and  wish  to  go  on.  So  when  the 
whistle  sounds  the  shift  downs  tools,  however 
vital  it  be  to  the  workers'  welfare,  and  to  the  life 
of  the  nation,  that  the  particular  effort  on  which 
that  shift  is  engaged  go  through. 


CHAPTER  XVII 

THE  EDUCATION  OF  THE  ADOLESCENT 

SINCE  Dr.  Montessori  has  only  worked  out 
her  method,  experimentally,  for  the  first  eleven 
years  of  a  child's  life,  and  since  immense  changes 
occur  in  the  child-psyche  with  every  fresh  faculty 
that  is  developed — the  baby  in  the  cradle  being 
a  different  creature  from  the  crawling  child,  the 
crawling  child  different  from  the  "toddler,"  the 
two-year-old  from  the  four-year-old,  the  seven- 
year-old  from  the  ten-year-old — there  is,  as  Mr. 
Claremont  has  said  in  his  pamphlet,  A  Review 
of  Montessori  Literature,  no  such  thing  at  pres- 
ent as  a  Montessori  method  for  children  older 
than  ten. 

"The  freedom  given,"  he  says,  "in  schools  pro- 
fessing an  'atmosphere  of  freedom,'  or  which, 
as  is  sometimes  claimed,  adopt  the  'Montessori 
Principle'  but  not  the  Montessori  apparatus,  is 
but  a  myth  .  .  .  and  this  is  inevitable  until  the 
means  of  permitting  such  freedom  are  devised." 

In  the  institute  at  Barcelona  some  progress  has 
been  made  with  the  method  as  it  may  eventually 

133 


134  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

be  applied  to  secondary  schools,  and  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori  hopes  to  go  on  with  this  in  the  intervals 
of  the  work  with  the  tiny  babies,  on  which  her 
heart  is  set.  She  has  every  aspect  of  education 
in  mind,  in  connection  with  everything  that  she 
does,  but  she  wants,  above  all,  collaborators:  sec- 
ondary school  masters  and  mistresses  who  will 
master  her  basic  conception  of  the  "average  psy- 
chological ages,"  and,  experimenting  on  that 
basis,  let  her  know  their  results.  Just  as  there 
is  an  average  age  when  the  child,  if  allowed,  will 
eat,  and  breathe,  and  dream  alphabets — when 
even  his  food  does  not  interest  him  so  much  as 
the  inscription,  "A  Present  from  Brighton,"  on 
the  plate — so  she  believes  that  there  is  an  age 
for  making  Latin  verse,  an  age  for  sculpture,  an 
age  for  trigonometry,  an  age  for  woodcraft,  an 
age  for  cookery,  Shakespeare,  and  the  observa- 
tion of  the  stars.  What  the  school  has  to  do  is 
to  provide  the  elements  of  all  these  things  so 
that  the  child  may  move  freely  among  them  and 
choose  what  his  soul  desires.  On  the  observation 
of  what  he  does  we  can  base  our  method. 

At  Barcelona,  and  at  Mr.  Grant's  school  at 
Harpenden,  experiments  will  be  carried  on  in  a 
direction  that  will,  she  hopes,  eventually  approxi- 
mate secondary  education  to  that  best  type  of 
university  education  where  the  student  is  free 
for  research  and  works  not  for  examinations  but 


THE  EDUCATION  OF  THE  ADOLESCENT  135 

for  the  preparation  of  theses.  Dr.  Montessori 
is  well  aware  that  work  on  these  lines  is  being 
attempted  in  many  schools  both  in  England  and 
on  the  Continent,  and  welcomes  gladly  any  news 
of  such  experiments  that  reaches  her.  There 
seems  no  reason  why  instruction  of  this  kind 
should  not  replace  the  often  perfunctory  school- 
ing of  our  own  public  schools,  without  disturbing 
the  atmosphere  or  tradition.  It  cannot  be  too 
often  repeated  that  it  is  our  methods  of  instruc- 
tion that  Dr.  Montessori  is  seeking  to  improve. 
She  does  not  want,  for  instance,  to  belittle  the 
"corporate  spirit,"  but  she  labors  under  no  delu- 
sion that  any  corporate  spirit  other  than  the 
common  spirit  of  revolt  can  be  fostered  by  class- 
teaching  as  it  now  is.  I  am  often  asked  how  far 
she  encourages  team-work,  and  the  answer  is  that 
she  "lets  it  happen."  So  far  as  children  can  work 
better  in  groups  they  tend  to  do  so,  and  there 
is,  in  fact,  a  good  deal  of  natural  grouping  in  a 
Montessori  school. 

I  have  heard  the  doubt  expressed  whether  free 
opportunity  for  research  will  be  appreciated  by 
the  ordinary  child.  If  not,  it  is  not  a  condem- 
nation of  the  new  methods,  but  of  the  old,  that 
make  the  ordinary  child  lazy  and  dull.  The  point 
also  arises:  whether  the  Montessori  method  fits 
or  unfits  children  for  the  ordinary  secondary 
schools.  Dr.  Montessori  tells  me  that  the  pass- 


136  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

ing  of  entrance  examinations  to  such  schools  is 
nothing,  because  the  children  are  so  intelligent 
and  have  such  a  broad  basis  of  reasoning  power, 
that  they  can  quickly  be  "crammed"  if  necessary, 
and  as  long  as  the  present  ridiculous  examination 
system  persists.  I  am  occasionally  told  that  the 
Montessori  children  are  "backward,"  and  I  think 
that  this  probably  means  that  they  have  no 
parrot-knowledge,  and  no  glib  facility  in  display- 
ing what  they  know.  The  whole  of  the  Montes- 
sori system  is  opposed  to  anything  in  the  nature 
of  showing  off  or  working  for  results.  If  the 
teachers  in  the  secondary  schools  are  sympathetic, 
they  find  the  Montessori  children  charming 
pupils,  eager  for  knowledge,  and  possessed  of 
more  critical  faculty  than  other  children  of  their 
age.  They  have  to  be  allowed  to  work,  however, 
and  to  work  undisturbed,  and  the  ordinary 
schools  sometimes  cannot  supply  enough  material 
to  satisfy  them. 

Dr.  Montessori  told  me  of  a  little  girl  who, 
promoted  to  a  secondary  school,  came  home  and 
asked  her  mother  if  she  might  take  needle-work 
to  school  with  her,  because  the  teachers  did  all 
the  lessons  and  she  had  nothing  to  do.  "Oh,  they 
do  waste  my  time!"  moaned  a  little  Montessorian 
in  an  ordinary  kindergarten  in  Edinburgh. 

The  psychological  age  for  learning  mother- 
craft  Dr.  Montessori  believes  to  be  twelve  or 


THE  EDUCATION  OF  THE  ADOLESCENT  137 

thirteen.  The  little  girls  of  the  poor  have  to 
mind  the  baby,  anyhow,  but  would  do  it  with 
more  pleasure  and  profit  if  they  were  shown 
how.  No  doctor  really  likes  a  growing  girl  to 
be  sitting  still  all  day  doing  lessons.  Yet  grow- 
ing girls'  minds  must  be  occupied.  At  that  age 
nearly  all  children  love  a  baby,  and  will  devote 
themselves  to  learning  baby  ways  with  a  more 
single-minded  devotion  than  can  ever  inspire 
them  later,  when  a  thousand  other  conflicting 
attractions  have  come  into  their  lives.  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori  has  found  little  girls  of  twelve  to  be  per- 
fect "Montessori  teachers." 

Dr.  Montessori  never  pushes  a  truth  to  the 
point  of  absurdity  or  even  of  laughableness,  but 
would  not  deny  that  some  training  of  this  kind 
even  for  boys  would  diminish  the  irresponsibility 
of  the  male  population,  solve  some  of  the  growing 
boys'  as  well  as  the  growing  girls'  problems,  and 
help  to  produce  that  ideal  type  of  father  who 
can  give  baby  its  bottle  at  a  pinch  and  is  not 
ashamed  of  pushing  the  pram.  The  human 
embryo  shows  little  differentiation  of  sex  in  the 
early  stages:  yet  no  one  is  anxious  on  that  ac- 
count lest  it  should  develop  into  something  that 
is  neither  definitely  a  boy  nor  a  girl.  But  in  a 
family  there  is  often  great  fear  that  a  boy  will 
not  become  manly  if  he  knows  much  about 
domestic  things.  Yet  in  later  life  (by  common 


138  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

standards  of  virility)  the  more  obvious  "man" 
is  not  the  helpless  type,  but  rather  the  able- 
bodied  seaman,  however  rough,  or  the  common 
soldier  who  sits  in  the  sun  by  the  barrack-room 
door,  knitting  himself  a  football  jersey,  after  he 
has  finished  scrubbing  his  canvas  clothing,  and 
the  pots  and  pans  in  the  cookhouse,  and  the 
barrack-room  floor. 

As  to  the  teaching  of  sex-hygiene,  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori  believes  that  if  necessity  exists  to-day  for 
formal  teaching  on  such  points,  it  is  a  proof  of 
the  fundamental  falsity  and  artificiality  of  our 
outlook  upon  life.  She  told  me  of  a  town  child 
in  America  who  had  never  seen  a  cow  milked, 
and  who,  when  she  first  found  out  where  milk 
came  from,  «,t  the  age  of  nine,  was  hysterically 
sick  at  the  thought  of  having  drunk  milk  all  her 
life.  In  the  same  way  life  tends  to  divorce  our 
children  from  all  the  daily  facts  of  life.  Yet  the 
child  of  four  or  five  wants  to  know  how  and  why 
a  hen  lays  an  egg,  in  all  sweet  innocence,  just  as 
it  wants  to  know  why  "i"  has  a  dot,  why  "1" 
has  none:  and  at  each  psychological  age  asks  a 
hundred  simple  questions  which  if  simply  an- 
swered, will  bring  it  up  thinking  little  about  such 
things,  knowing,  half-instinctively,  all  that  it 
needs  to  know. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

WHEN  Dr.  Montessori  gave  her  lecture  (in- 
terpreted by  Dr.  Crichton  Miller)  before  the 
medical  section  of  the  British  Psychological 
Society,  the  keynote  of  the  meeting  was  the 
question  whether  the  work  that  she  is  doing  will 
eventually  make  the  work  of  the  "nerve-special- 
ist" superfluous.  As.  Dr.  Crichton  Miller  said 
to  her  and  to  me,  when  the  Montessori  system  is 
established  in  all  schools,  almshouses  will  have  to 
be  set  up  for  the  psycho-analysts.  For  the  trou- 
bles that  psycho-analysis  discovers  and  disperses 
are  such  as,  if  human  growth  followed  its  normal 
course,  should  not  occur.  The  Montessori  chil- 
dren have  so  much  "way  on" — the  current  of 
their  life  runs  so  deep  and  strong,  that  there 
seems  no  reason  why  they  should  go  aground  or 
drift  into  backwaters.  If  any  doctors  wish  to 
disprove  this  they  will  assuredly  not  fall  into 
the  error  of  basing  their  assertions  on  the  pre- 
Montessori  child.  The  child  who  is  allowed  to 
grow  freely,  and  to  have  all  the  solid  concrete 

139 


140  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

material  it  wants  to  exercise  its  imagination  upon, 
is  not  the  child  whom  former  pedagogists  have 
described  to  us. 

"The  child,"  says  Dewey,  "lives  in  a  some- 
what narrow  world  of  personal  contacts.  Things, 
hardly  come  within  his  experience  unless  they 
touch,  intimately  and  obviously,  his  own  well- 
being,  or  that  of  his  family  and  friends.  His 
world  is  a  world  of  persons,  with  their  personal 
interests,  rather  than  a  realm  of  facts  and  laws." 

Dr.  Montessori  has  found  this  preoccupation 
of  children  with  the  ways  of  other  people,  and 
especially  older  people,  which  had  seemed  so 
universal  in  children,  and  to  which  Jung  has 
traced  back  so  many  human  ills,  to  be  an  arti- 
ficial preoccupation,  induced  by  direct  adult  sug- 
gestion in  an  unformed  mind  which  has  been 
given  nothing  but  personal  interests  to  exercise 
itself  upon. 

Dr.  Montessori  gives  one  the  impression  of  a 
shepherd  in  Israel  who  has  "happened"  upon 
the  summit  of  Pisgah  in  the  course  of  the  daily 
round,  and  who,  not  being  a  prophet  by  pro- 
fession, scarcely  knows  how  to  tell  all  she  has 
seen.  The  medical  world  of  a  decade  or  two  ago 
ceased  to  be  interested  in  her  when  she  took  up 
the  study  of  normality.  One  of  her  own  chiefs 
in  the  medical  schools  told  her,  in  so  many  words, 


THE  NEW  CHILDREN  141 

that  she  was  lowering  the  prestige  of  the  medical 
profession  by  making  of  herself  tcuna  maestro, 
di  asilo  infantile"  Believing  her  to  be  an  edu- 
cator and  education  an  empiric  affair,  outside 
the  scope  of  science,  scientists  have  scarcely  yet 
waked  up  to  her  existence.  A  hundred  years 
hence  they  will  want  her  back.  For,  whatever 
reluctance  there  may  be  to  accept  her  conclusions, 
nobody  can  deny  that  from  the  merely  encyclo- 
pedic point  of  view  she  has  made  a  more  minute 
and  a  more  extensive  study  than  any  person  who 
has  yet  lived,  of  children  normal  and  abnormal, 
of  all  ages,  types,  classes  and  races.  She  herself 
feels  herself  almost  hopelessly  inarticulate  in  the 
face  of  all  there  is  to  say,  and  of  all  that  yet  re- 
mains to  be  proven. 

"I  don't  now  what  to  do,"  she  said  to  me  the 
other  day.  "There  is  so  much  of  it,  and  nobody 
will  ever  collaborate.  Either  they  accept  what 
I  say,  and  ask  for  more,  or  else  they  waste 
precious  time  in  criticizing.  What  I  want  now  is 
a  body  of  colleagues,  research  workers,  who  will 
examine  what  I  have  already  done,  apply  my 
principles  as  far  as  I  have  gone,  not  in  a  spirit 
of  opposition  or  conviction,  but  as  a  matter  of 
experiment.  Then  they  can  help  me  with  con- 
structive criticism,  after,  not  before,  the  event. 
I  have  never  yet  had  any  one — starting  from 
my  own  previous  body  of  knowledge — work 
shoulder  to  shoulder  with  me  in  a  scientific  inde- 


142  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

pendence.  Now  that  doctors  and  psychologists 
are  beginning  to  take  an  interest  in  normal  chil- 
dren, perhaps  some  of  them  will  help  me.  At 
present  I  am  in  a  kind  of  isolation,  which  is  the 
last  thing  I  desire.  Questo  lavoro  e  troppo  per 
una  persona  sola — sono  troppo  sola  nel  mondo" 

Unfortunately  for  Dr.  Montessori,  those  who 
have  had  the  handling  of  children  in  bulk  are  in 
a  sense  unfitted  for  the  examination  of  the  indi- 
vidual child.  For  the  child  that  the  schools  of 
to-day  know  is  not  the  real  child,  but  a  child 
drilled  and  suggested  into  artificiality  by  the 
adult.  The  human  child  has,  since  the  dawn 
of  human  reason,  suffered  under  one  great  disad- 
vantage which  other  growing  creatures  escape. 
Man  is  able  consciously  to  measure  his  offspring's 
development.  This  consciousness  is  a  compara- 
tively new  acquisition  of  man.  It  is  useful  for 
so  many  purposes  that  man  has  pardonably  come 
to  believe  it  sufficient  for  all  purposes.  Thus 
he  has  fallen  into  disastrous  errors.  There  are 
innumerable  things  of  which  we  should  judge 
with  the  unconscious  soul  through  intuition,  not 
with  the  conscious  mind  through  reason.  If  we 
think  logically  about  education,  we  are  bound 
to  leave  out  a  million  factors.  We  shall  never 
see  a  reason  for  the  irrational.  Yet  the  irrational 
plays  a  most  necessary  part  in  human  growth. 
As  Dr.  Montessori  said  to  me  a  few  days  ago, 


THE  NEW  CHILDREN  143 

although  one  eye  is  enough  to  see  with,  yet  we 
have  two;  although  it  would  be  more  convenient 
to  be  clothed  with  fur,  yet  we  have  none;  al- 
though the  essential  parts  of  a  flower  are  pistil 
and  stamens,  yet  without  the  corolla  there  is  no 
flower.  One  cannot  count  and  define  and  meas- 
ure everything.  But  from  the  fact  that  we  are 
able  to  observe  certain  phenomena  connected 
with  the  child's  development  we  have  come  to 
believe  that  we  understand  it  all;  that  it  is  we, 
moreover,  who  are  responsible  for  his  growth. 
At  Harpenden,  Dr.  Montessori  described  how 
modern  biological  knowledge  removes  from  us 
this  responsibility  that  we  have  so  long  and 
fondly  believed  to  be  ours.  The  conception  of 
the  "transforming  environment"  has  long  since 
given  place,  for  biologists,  to  the  conception  of 
the  "helping  environment."  That  is  to  say,  that 
though  we  cannot  create  growth  we  are  able,  by 
withholding  proper  food,  to  stunt  it.  We  can 
stunt  it,  moreover,  in  a  subtle  way  by  not  allow- 
ing room  for  growth  to  take  place.  "If  we  have 
preconceptions  as  to  what  growth  should  pre- 
cisely consist  in,  those  very  preconceptions  may 
hinder  the  growth." 

The  child  grows  because  it  has  characteristics, 
like  every  other  living  being.  Which  of  us  by 
taking  thought  can  add  one  cubic  unto  his 
stature?  If  the  child  tends  to  become  strong  in 


144  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

character,  active,  good,  intelligent,  with  the  use 
of  eye,  ear,  and  hand — social,  serviceable,  literate 
—it  is  because  those  are  the  proper  characteristics 
of  a  well-grown  man.  This  consummation  will 
take  place  if  the  means  are  provided,  but  it  will 
not  take  place  through  any  direct  effort  of  the 
adult.  The  effect  is  not  predetermined  in  the 
cause,  but  for  all  we  know  the  preceding  train  of 
action  may  be  consequent  on  the  effect.  If  all  be, 
as  Bergson  has  taught  us,  an  interpenetration, 
a  simultaneity,  which  for  private  reasons  we  have 
pigeon-holed  and  considered  piecemeal,  the  past 
may  come  after  the  future  just  as  well  as  the 
future  after  the  past.  All  may,  in  fact,  be  hap- 
pening at  once.  Though  the  brain  cannot  know 
about  the  future,  yet  life  itself  evidently  knows 
about  it,  since  the  untaught  plant  behaves,  in 
the  seedling  stage,  in  that  manner  which  will 
lead  it  to  expand  and  flower.  Child  life  has  the 
same  instinctive  knowledge  as  plant  life. 

This  theory  of  the  inherent  unconscious  wis- 
dom of  the  individual  life,  apart  from  the  ac- 
quired conscious  knowledge  of  society,  is  borne 
out  by  the  observations  of  Dr.  Montessori  and 
her  assistants  as  to  the  types  of  work  which, 
under  free  conditions,  hold  the  children's  interest 
longest.  There  is,  she  is  convinced,  no  need  for 
the  teacher  to  press  matters  upon  the  children's 
attention,  or  to  be  anxious  lest  they  should  grow 


THE  NEW  CHILDREN  145 

one-sided.  The  child,  if  left  alone  with  the  ele- 
ments of  all  things,  will  choose  out  the  needful 
and  absorb  and  digest  it,  just  as  surely  as  the 
seedling  can  be  trusted  to  draw  from  the  soil  the 
sustenance  that  will  help  it  to  grow  into  a  fir, 
or  an  ash,  or  an  oak.  Provide  sufficient  material 
and  allow  free  choice  of  action:  safeguard  the 
action  to  a  finish:  these  are  the  duties  of  the 
teacher,  and  life  can  be  trusted  to  do  the  rest  for 
itself. 

The  phenomenon  of  the  fixing  of  the  attention 
under  free  conditions  was  what  guided  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori  in  her  choice  of  material  and  of  the  method 
of  its  presentation.  The  "cycle  of  work"  shows 
a  constant  outline  as  soon  as  children  have  set- 
tled down  to  the  school  environment.  The  child 
on  first  entering  the  class  goes  to  the  cupboard 
and  chooses  a  task,  often  a  repetition  of  some- 
thing he  has  done  before.  To  this  task  he  applies 
himself  for  a  short  time,  after  which  he  leaves 
it  and  moves  about  the  room,  or  rests,  or  watches 
the  others.  Then  he  returns  to  the  cupboard 
and  gets  out  a  task  which  he  has  not  done  before, 
and  works  at  it  probably  for  a  long  time,  strongly 
attracted,  though  not  necessarily  silent,  and  cer- 
tainly not  motionless,  for  work  naturally  involves 
movement,  exercising  the  "whole  man."  This 
second  spell  of  work  Dr.  Montessori  character- 
izes as  il  gran  lavoro.  If  the  teacher  is  impatient 


146  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

for  it  to  begin,  it  is  apt  to  be  spoilt.  By  the 
refreshed  and  happy  state  in  which  these  periods 
of  work  leave  the  child,  the  teacher  can  see  that 
it  is  in  these  periods  that  the  personality  makes 
growth — by  which  is  meant  the  whole  person- 
ality, and  not  any  one  side  of  it.  The  movements 
by  which  the  work  is  carried  out  are  what  con- 
stitute mental  rest.  The  teacher  need  not  be 
anxious  as  to  the  content  of  what  the  child  does 
in  these  periods,  or  wonder  whether  he  is  "learn- 
ing anything."  There  need  never  be  anything  to 
show,  except  that  the  child  is  absorbed  at  the  time 
and  refreshed  and  happy  afterwards.  Whether 
we  understand  the  process  or  not,  something  is 
being  taken  in  which  is  being  incorporated  in  a 
vital  manner  into  the  tree  of  life.  If  hand  and 
ear  and  eye  and  brain  are  at  the  same  time  being 
shaped  to  what  we  can  see  to  be  useful  and  godly 
ends,  that  is  because  it  is  the  nature  of  man  so 
to  do,  and  not  otherwise. 

Man  is  so  much  attached  to  the  conception  of 
original  sin  that  he  is  not  likely  .on  the  mere  word 
of  any  one  person  to  believe  that  the  old  Adam 
is  a  figment — that,  in  fact,  there  "ain't  no  sich 
person."  Yet  this  incredible  fact,  that  the  chil- 
dren are  all  children  of  God,  and  none  of  them 
children  of  Satan,  is  being  demonstrated  daily 
in  the  Montessori  schools.  The  children  do  not 
want  to  be  naughty.  It  tires  and  bores  them  to 


THE  NEW  CHILDREN  147 

be  idle.  If  the  heavy  deterrent  force  of  adult 
interference,  of  unfavorable  adult  suggestion,  is 
removed,  then  the  children  of  their  own  accord 
work  hard,  seek  after  knowledge,  cooperate  with 
their  elders,  and  dwell  in  helpful  harmony  with 
one  another.  All  this  happens  as  automatically 
as  the  same  phenomenon  happens  in  a  forest, 
when  a  sapling  is  taken  out  from  under  the  sun- 
less, root-bound  shelter  of  surrounding  grown 
trees  and  put  out  by  itself,  on  the  lee  side  of  the 
trees,  to  draw  nourishment  freely  for  itself  from 
soil  and  sun  and  air.  When  one  realizes  that 
every  normal  child  might  be  a  "new  child,"  that 
no  ordinary  person  need  fail  in  life  if  he  were 
properly  brought  up,  one  understands  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori's  "divine  impatience"  that  the  truths 
which  she  has  established  may  prevail. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

THE  ENGLISH  NURSERY   SCHOOL 

JUST  as  Dr.  Montessori  was  preparing  to  re- 
turn to  Italy,  having  given  her  message  to  the 
English  people,  a  book  on  The  Nursery  School 
was  published,  the  work  of  that  great  English 
social  reformer,  Miss  Margaret  McMillan,  who 
claims  to  have  based  the  methods  she  has  used 
upon  the  work  of  Seguin.  Miss  McMillan  also 
claims  to  educate  children  "through  the  imagina- 
tion," and  has  laid  herself  open  to  the  criticism  of 
vagueness  on  the  ground  that  no  two  psycholo- 
gists have  ever  given  to  the  word  "imagination" 
one  sense.  Dr.  Ballard  found  seventeen  totally 
different  connotations  of  this  word  to  be  in  com- 
mon use.  My  own  limited  research  in  this  direc- 
tion convinced  me  that  the  word  "imagination" 
is  in  need  of  a  rest,  and  I  was  confirmed  in  this 
opinion  by  the  fact  that  the  psycho-analysts 
scarcely  use  it  at  all,  but  have  split  it  into  a 
number  of  more  exact  terms,  from  unconscious 
memory  upwards  through  a  chromatic  scale  of 
delicate  definitions. 

148 


THE  ENGLISH  NURSERY  SCHOOL      149 

The  nursery-school  movement  in  this  country 
owes  more  to  Miss  Margaret  McMillan,  prob- 
ably, than  to  any  other  one  person.  It  is  she  who 
has  shown  up  the  need  for  the  nursery  school  in 
strong  light,  reflected  from  ugly  facts.  But  the 
nursery-school  movement  is  hanging  fire.  On 
every  hand  one  hears  that  the  local  authorities, 
in  the  present  state  of  their  finances,  cannot  bear 
the  expense  of  nursery  schools.  In  any  case,  one 
is  told  only  a  very  few  of  them  can  be  set  up  in 
the  poorest  districts  of  large  cities.  The  Presi- 
dent of  the  Board  of  Education  said  to  the  pres- 
ent writer  that  equipment  was  so  expensive  and 
the  local  authorities  so  crippled  by  the  increase 
in  teachers'  salaries,  that  reform  in  the  nursery- 
school  direction  must  perforce  wait.  "We  must 
not  be  impatient,"  says  Mr.  Fisher.  "I  think 
we  shall  have  to  wait  until  we  can  do  it  really 
well"  is  the  opinion  of  members  of  more  than 
one  great  education  committee.  But  the  Inspec- 
tors of  Schools,  who  know  most  about  actual 
conditions,  and  who  know  how  urgent  is  the 
necessity  for  the  nursery  school,  believe  that  it 
will  be  attained  by  reform  of  the  present  infants' 
departments  of  elementary  schools  or  not  at  all. 
And  the  road  to  reform  of  the  infant  schools  is 
the  adoption  of  the  methods  of  the  Case  dei 
Bambini. 

How  over-emphasis  on  the  English  "nursery" 


150  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

idea,  with  all  its  excellences,  has  brought  about 
the  existing  attitude  on  the  part  of  authorities 
towards  the  nursery  school,  will  be  clear  to  any 
one  who  reads  Miss  McMillan's  book.  Miss  Mc- 
Millan is  a  social  reformer  first,  an  educator 
second.  Living  in  the  midst  of  submerged 
humanity,  her  ideal  has  been  to  bring  the  sub- 
merged portion  of  humanity  up  to  the  existing 
standards  of  living.  The  nurseries  of  the  well- 
to-do  are  the  model  for  the  nursery  school  as 
here  conceived.  Give  the  slum  child,  says  Miss 
McMillan,  the  same  environment  in  babyhood  as 
the  rich  child — fresh  air,  flower-gardens,  warm 
baths,  good  clothes,  rest,  educated  nurses,  loving 
care — and  all  will  be  well  with  him.  But  at  this 
raising  of  the  slum  child  to  "standard"  Miss 
McMillan  stops  short.  She  has  catered  for  the 
slum  child,  and  scarcely  at  all  for  the  children 
of  the  decent-living,  or  of  the  lower  middle 
classes.  The  rich  child  has  had  all  these  things 
already  that  she  claims  for  the  slum  children, 
and  yet  falls  far  short  of  the  millennium.  The 
working  man  thinks  that  such  upbringing  does 
not  produce  a  type  enormously  superior  to  his 
own. 

Dr.  Montessori's  message  is  one  of  hope  for 
immediate  realization.  As  a  doctor  she  never 
prescribed  impossibilities,  and  as  a  reformer  she 
does  not  indicate  reform  without  also  indicating 


THE  ENGLISH  NURSERY  SCHOOL      151 

in  detail  how  it  can  be  achieved.  She  cares  as 
little  for  "standards  of  living"  as  did  St.  Francis. 
In  fact,  in  Italy,  beyond  the  simple  essentials, 
domestic  luxury  is  little  cultivated,  whether  in 
palace  or  cottage.  Saints  and  patriots,  poets 
and  painters  grow  easily  in  Italy,  whether  in 
garden  or  street,  country  or  town.  The  national 
Church,  for  the  last  five  hundred  years,  has  incul- 
cated the  ideal  of  poverty.  The  extremes — 
material  luxury  at  the  one  end,  and  dirt  and 
horror  at  the  other — of  our  industrial  city  system 
have  not  far  invaded  Italian  life.  Neither  Dr. 
Montessori  nor  any  of  her  followers  can  see  any 
sense  in  the  general  demand  for  expenditure  in 
connection  with  English  nursery  schools.  It  is 
true  that  no  parallel  exists  in  Italy  to  the  squalor 
and  gloom  of  our  own  average  elementary  school. 
The  elementary  school  in  Italy  is  a  democratic 
institution  frequented  by  all,  and  possesses  suffi- 
cient light,  sufficient  air,  hot  water  and  baths. 
But  the  unsuitability  of  our  elementary  schools 
as  environment  for  children,  so  strongly  empha- 
sized by  Miss  McMillan,  does  not  do  away,  for 
Dr.  Montessori,  with  the  advisability  of  getting 
the  babies  of  the  populace  into  them,  away  from 
the  hurry  and  noise  of  adult  life,  and  the  dirt  of 
the  pavements  and  the  streets.  If  material  can- 
not be  bought,  the  teachers  can  make  something 
to  go  on  with ;  if  furniture  is  expensive,  the  chil- 


152  THE  NEW  CHILDREN 

dren  can  work  and  play  on  rugs  laid  down  on  the 
floor.  Where  two  or  three  children  are  working 
together  in  peace  and  harmony,  there  is  Christ 
in  the  midst  of  them,  even  in  a  bare  room.  Not 
by  our  efforts,  but  by  the  natural  innocence  and 
goodness  of  the  children  the  atmosphere  is 
created.  The  amenities  of  life  can  follow  as 
means  permit. 

Miss  McMillan's  work  has  been  a  great  protest 
against  the  existing  social  order.  Parts  of  her 
book  are  painful,  and  at  the  same  time  most  elo- 
quent of  the  necessity  of  what  she  has  done. 
With  a  Christ-like  love  and  persistence  she 
gathers  the  trampled  flowers  of  childhood  out  of 
the  gutter — often  the  same  child  again  and  again 
— and  nurses  them  to  life  in  the  oasis  she  has 
created  for  them  in  the  desert  of  East-end  slum- 
dom.  She  and  her  brave  little  company  of  work- 
ers wage  war  against  one  symptom  after  another 
of  an  unhealthy  social  condition — drink,  brutal- 
ity, coarse  enjoyments,  "dirt  diseases."  They 
go  as  missionaries  and  as  learners  into  filthy 
cellars  where  children  are  being  born  and  bred. 
They  reason  with  mothers  who  spend  their  nights 
drinking  and  fighting,  while  three-year-old  chil- 
dren are  locked  out,  crying,  in  the  rain.  Some 
of  the  children  go  home  well  on  Saturday  and 
come  back  ill  on  Monday,  week  after  week. 
Almost  all  the  children  contract  some  disease  in 


THE  ENGLISH  NURSERY  SCHOOL      153 

the  summer  holidays,  when  the  school  is  shut.  All 
Miss  McMillan's  teachers  learn  to  be  social 
workers. 

"The  grim  street,  the  public-house  and  pawn- 
shop area,  the  drunkenness,  the  cruel  rack-rent- 
ing, the  epidemics  and  high  death-rate,  concern 
the  teachers  just  as  bombs  and  gangrene  and 
broken  limbs  concern  the  nurses  in  a  war  hos- 
pital." 

Miss  McMillan,  like  all  social  workers,  attacks 
established  disease.  Dr.  Montessori,  as  a  pro- 
fessor of  preventive  medicine,  is  working  rather 
to  cut  at  the  roots  of  that  evil  which  comes,  in 
the  long  run,  from  lack  of  discrimination,  from 
wrong  senses  of  value.  Her  aim  is  not  merely 
to  produce  a  worker  who  will  not  submit  to  the 
old  evil  conditions  of  industrialism  because  he 
has  known  something  better.  Throughout  all 
classes  of  all  races  she  is  working  to  produce 
finer  perceptions,  finer  moral  sense.  Children 
who  have  grown  up  in  nurseries  and  gardens 
have  still  become  ignorant  agitators,  heavy 
oppressors  of  their  kind.  But  in  what  is  often 
the  poor  austerity  of  the  Case  dei  Bambini  we 
may  believe  that  those  are  being  bred  who  will, 
as  Prof.  Foster- Watson  has  said  to  me,  not 
"make"  the  better  social  order,  but  "be"  it;  that 
a  generation  of  just  men,  eschewing  evil,  is  grow- 
ing up  to  take  charge  of  the  world. 


APPENDIX     I 

AN  ENGLISH  WELCOME 

INHERE  was  a  great  gathering  at  the  Savoy  Hotel  on  the 
5th  of  December,  19 19^  when  the  dinner  took  place  which 
represented  England's  welcome  to  Dr.  Montessori.  Mr. 
H.  A.  L.  Fisher,  President  of  the  Board  of  Education,  oc- 
cupied the  chair,  Dr.  Montessori  being  seated  on  his  right. 
Special  messages  were  sent  by  the  Italian  Royal  Family. 
The  Syndic  of  Naples,  where  the  State  schools  are  being 
reconstructed  on  Montessori  lines,  wrote  as  follows: 

"I  am  glad  to  have  an  opportunity  of  testifying  to  my 
feelings  of  high  admiration  and  deepest  devotion  for  the 
great  educational  work  of  Dr.  Montessori.  This  illustri- 
ous Italian  woman  has  known  how  to  realize  a  type  of 
school  where  the  pupil  receives  education  indeed — healthy, 
harmonious,  and  complete.  What  so  many  eminent  men 
have  sought  with  passion  has  been  found  by  a  woman  with 
a  keen  mind  and  a  great  heart.  My  greeting  to  the  moth- 
ers and  to  the  English  educators  who  have  been  able 
to  understand  and  honor  worthily  the  great  Italian  educa- 
tor." 

Telegrams  were  received  from  the  Syndic  of  Rome  and 
many  members  of  the  Italian  Government ;  from  the  Ameri- 
can Minister  of  Education;  and  from  members  of  the 
Catalonian  Government  in  Barcelona;  with  letters  from  the 
President  of  the  Catalonian  Senate,  and  from  friends  and 
supporters  of  Dr.  Montessori  in  Spain,  America,  and  in  all 
parts  of  Italy. 

154 


APPENDIX  I  155 

The  loyal  toasts  having  been  duly  honored,  Mr.  Fisher 
proposed  the  health  of  the  Italian  Royal  Family.  He  said 
they  had  followed  during  the  war  the  career  of  the  King 
of  Italy  with  profound  admiration.  His  Majesty  shared 
all  the  hardships  of  his  troops  at  the  front,  he  never  failed 
in  personal  courage,  endurance,  and  steadfastness,  and  he 
had  won  new  laurels  for  the  famous  house  of  Savoy.  His 
Queen  had  always  been  foremost  in  all  good  causes  and  he 
(the  Chairman)  had  the  pleasure  of  announcing  that  his 
Majesty  sent  them  a  special  message  of  sympathy  that  eve- 
ning for  their  illustrious  guest. 

Signer  G.  Balsamo,  Secretary  of  the  Italian  Embassy, 
responded  and  expressed  the  deep  regret  of  the  Italian 
Ambassador  at  being  unable  to  be  present  at  that  dinner 
in  honor  to  one  who  had  devoted  aU  her  energies  and  ac- 
tivities in  the  interest  of  childhood. 

Sir  James  Crichton  Browne  proposed  the  health  of  the 
guest  of  the  evening.  Dr.  Montessori  was  a  member  of 
the  profession  to  which  he  belonged,  and  he  was  sure  that 
had  she  not  been  a  doctor  she  could  not  have  accomplished 
her  momentous  task.  It  was  her  scientific  knowledge  that 
had  enabled  her  to  infuse  new  and  vivifying  influences 
into  a  somewhat  cadaverous  routine.  To  him  the  supreme 
merit  of  her  procedure  was  that  it  was  calculated  to  elimi- 
nate much  pain  and  strain  from  primary  education.  Many 
of  the  follies  and  vices  of  later  years  had  their  root  in  the 
petty  tyrannies  practiced  and  the  trials  and  terrors  en- 
dured in  early  childhood. 

Montessori  schools  had  sprung  up  in  every  civilized 
country,  and  Dr.  Montessori's  text-book  had  been  trans- 
lated into  English,  French,  Russian,  German,  Spanish,  Ru- 
manian, Danish,  Dutch,  and  Chinese.  The  Montessori 
lamp  had  already  freely  shed  its  light  on  this  country  and 
promised  much  brighter  illumination.  There  were  in  Eng- 
land a  hundred  schools  into  which  Montessori  methods  had 
been  introduced  and  in  a  much  larger  number  they  were 
being  experimentally  tried.  For  Dr.  Montessori's  four 
months'  training  course  in  London  250  students  were  en- 
rolled, and  these  were  selected  out  of  2,000  applicants. 
The  three-lecture  course  given  in  November  was  attended 


156  APPENDIX  I 

by  about  1,500  teachers,  and  the  popular  lecture  in  the 
Central  Hall,  Westminster,  by  2,700  people. 

Support  and  encouragement  were  now  pouring  in  on  Dr. 
Montessori  from  all  quarters  of  the  globe,  and  it  must,  he 
thought,  have  been  given  to  few  reformers  to  see  their 
work  prosper  so  abundantly  in  their  own  lifetime  as  Dr. 
Montessori's  Had  done.  Queen  Margaret  of  Savoy,  the 
present  Queen  Mother  of  Italy,  had  shown  her  interest  in 
the  Case  dei  Bambini  in  Rome,  and  furnished  the  means  to 
employ  five  mistresses  there.  The  Queen  of  Belgium  had 
personally  founded  two  Children's  Houses  in  Belgium. 
Miss  Margaret  Wilson,  the  daughter  of  President  Wilson, 
had  been  one  of  the  most  active  promulgators  of  the  Mon- 
tessori doctrine  in  the  United  States.  Pope  Benedict  had 
had  Dr.  Montessori's  books  placed  in  the  Vatican  library, 
and  had  sent  her  his  Apostolic  blessing. 

Dr.  Montessori  had  been  deluged  with  compliments  from 
eminent  persons,  but  he  hoped  she  would  not  despise  the 
democratic  compliment  which  they  wished  to  pay  her  that 
evening.  He  asked  them  to  drink  to  her  health,  and  to  the 
success  of  her  campaign  here  and  elsewhere. 

Dr.  Montessori,  who  was  greeted  with  cheers,  replied  in 
Italian.  She  said  she  thanked  them  for  the  great  honor 
they  were  doing  her,  by  which  she  felt  greatly  touched; 
but  she  recognized  that  it  represented  the  generosity  of 
English  feeling,  ever  watchful  for  the  good  of  the  chil- 
dren. It  represented,  too,  the  traditional  courtesy  of  their 
great  country,  always  hospitable,  always  encouraging  to 
any  individual  who  had  endeavored  to  do  any  work  for  the 
welfare  and  progress  of  humanity.  The  splendid  welcome 
that  she  had  had  in  London,  to  which  that  evening's  great 
gathering  was  a  wonderful  climax — this  would  be  a  memory 
for  all  her  life.  Two  months  ago  Sir  George  Kekewich 
said  to  her  that  by  neglecting  the  democratic  ideal  in 
education — by  not  throwing  open  the  gates  of  education 
to  all — a  great  asset  was  lost  to  a  nation — lost  in  the  chaos 
of  untaught  minds  and  souls  oppressed.  On  the  other 
hand,  to  open  the  gates  of  the  schools  to  all — that  is,  to 
give  all  the  means  of  developing  their  own  energies — was 
the  best  economy,  the  most  paying  business  of  a  nation. 


APPENDIX  I  157 

And  let  her  add:  if  the  school  should  become  to-morrow  a 
true  protection  to  humanity,  watching  over  human  develop- 
ment— such  a  school  would  be  as  it  were  a  mother  of  the 
nations.  It  would  be  impossible  then  to  conceive  of  the 
progress  of  civilization,  without  seeing  the  figure  of  edu- 
cation always  before  one's  eyes,  as  the  first  and  most  fun- 
damental factor  of  all  social  reconstruction.  The  State 
was  the  father  of  the  nation,  but  if  the  State  and  the  school 
were  unwedded  there  could  be  no  children;  nothing  could 
come  of  it. 

There  were  therefore  two  questions — that  of  giving  far 
more  possibilities  for  education  than  existed  to-day — and 
the  other,  not  less  important,  to  reform  the  school  within 
itself — to  improve  its  methods  in  order  that  it  might  serve 
truly  to  mother  free  men,  freely  developed. 

It  was  this  second  question,  the  question  of  reform,  that 
had  brought  them  together  there  that  night.  The  method 
that  was  called  by  her  name  represented  a  reform  of  the 
school.  She  wanted  to  take  that  occasion  to  draw  their 
attention  to  the  real  authors  of  her  work,  and  to  tell  them 
that  the  honor  they  were  doing  her  that  night  was  due  to 
others,  not  to  herself,  to  a  score  or  so  of  tiny  children — 
poor  people's  children — gathered  together  out  of  the 
slums;  tiny  creatures,  some  two  years  old,  some  three, 
four,  five.  It  was  they  who  had  spoken  with  such  elo- 
quence, whose  cry  had  so  gone  up  to  heaven  that  they  had 
been  heard  by  all  nations,  by  almost  all  the  races  of  the 
world. 

All  true  progress  towards  the  knowledge  of  living  crea- 
tures had  been  gained  by  the  observation  of  the  simplest 
forms  of  life.  In  the  simple  forms  were  clearly  revealed 
those  facts  which  in  the  more  complex  forms  were  hidden 
from  analysis.  The  study  of  simple  forms  of  life  revealed 
the  truths  of  life  like  the  key  of  an  enigma.  Not  only  the 
body  of  man  stood  in  need  of  embryology,  which  should 
illuminate  the  story  of  its  development;  human  society 
needed  also  to  seek  the  truth  in  an  embryology  not  of  the 
body  but  of  the  spirit.  From  the  laws  of  development 
only  could  we  learn  what  was  necessary  to  man's  welfare 
and  establish  the  life  of  the  community  on  the  firm  basis 


158  APPENDIX  I 

of  reality  and  of  the  knowledge  of  the  laws  that  governed 
life. 

She  would  thank  them  now  in  the  name  of  those  little 
children  who  actually  lived,  ten  years  or  so  ago,  in  the 
wretched  tenements  of  the  San  Lorenzo  quarter  and  in  the 
Convent  of  the  Franciscan  Missionaries,  in  Rome.  They 
were  big  boys  and  girls  now,  Italian  boys  and  girls,  twelve 
to  eighteen  years  old.  In  their  name  she  thanked  Mr. 
Fisher,  Sir  James  Crichton  Browne,  and  Sir  George  Keke- 
wich  for  their  kind  words  to  her.  She  thanked  the 
honorary  Committee  of  the  Course,  and  her  honorary 
organizer,  Mr.  Bang.  She  would  thank  them  all  in  thank- 
ing Sir  George  Kekewich,  and  that  person  whose  name 
stood  first  on  the  list  of  the  honorary  committee,  whose 
name  was  very  near  to  her  heart,  the  name  of  the  Ambas- 
sador of  Italy  in  England.  She  thanked  all  her  English 
students  and  the  pioneer  of  them  all,  Mrs.  Lily  Hutchin- 
son,  who,  sent  to  Rome  by  the  London  County  Council, 
brought  back  with  her  that  spirit  of  well-wishing  which 
enabled  this  work  to  be  started  in  the  London  schools. 
She  thanked  Dr.  Kimmins  most  deeply  for  his  kind  and 
consistent  encouragement,  and  through  him  the  London 
County  Council.  It  was  the  love  of  the  children  that 
had  brought  Mrs.  Radice  to  visit  her,  "una  donna  eletta, 
dallo  spirito  fiammeggiante."  Finally,  they  would  let  her 
thank  them  all  from  her  own  heart  for  the  help  and 
support  which  she  so  deeply  felt  herself  to  have  received 
from  them.  The  strength  of  those  who  were  fighting 
any  battle  needed  to  be  renewed,  and  recognition  given 
them  was  a  pledge  of  more  strength  for  the  future. 
She  knew  that  she  had  the  merit  at  least  of  being  a 
fighter,  in  what  she  believed  to  be  the  cause  of  humanity. 
She  thanked  the  President  of  the  Board  of  Education  from 
herself  and  from  her  colleagues,  Signora  Anna  Maccheroni, 
Miss  Pyle,  and  Signorina  Anna  Fedeli,  for  his  kindly 
presence  there  that  night. 

She  thanked  the  English  Press  for  their  kindly  and 
courteous  reception  of  her,  and,  above  all,  the  veteran 
international  newspaper,  the  heritage  of  all  the  nations  of 
the  world,  The  Times.  She  thanked,  finally,  the  Mon- 


APPENDIX  I  159 

tessori  Society  and  the  honorary  committee,  which  had 
helped  her  in  all  her  work  in  this  country. 

Let  her  end  with  an  apostrophe  to  a  Sovereign.  In 
these  times  they  heard  from  two  different  camps  the  same 
cry — Liberty,  independence.  What  the  revolutionaries 
demanded  could  be  more  safely  put  in  practice  by  the 
little  child  who  rose  up  in  majesty,  to  guide  them  to  the 
earthly  realization  of  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven.  To  this 
humble  hidden  King  of  Humanity,  the  little  unconsidered 
child,  she  paid  her  homage.  (Prolonged  cheers.) 

The  President  of  the  Board  of  Education,  in  responding 
to  the  toast  of  "Education,"  coupled  with  his  own  name, 
proposed  by  Sir  George  Kekewich,  said  they  had  there 
that  day  the  great  pleasure  and  the  great  honor  of  the 
presence  of  the  most  distinguished  educatress  of  our  times. 
England  had  owed  many  debts  to  Italy.  There  had  been, 
perhaps,  no  more  powerful  political  influence  in  the 
democratic  thought  of  this  country  than  the  influence  of 
Mazzini,  and  now  we  owed  a  deep  debt  of  gratitude  to 
this  Italian  lady  of  genius  who  had  devoted  thought, 
sympathy,  knowledge  and  trained  intelligence  to  the  needs 
of  the  child. 

Sir  George  Kekewich  had  asked  him  whether  he  would 
see  to  it  that  the  teachers  in  this  country  had  power  to 
adopt  Dr.  Montessori's  methods.  There  were  several 
schools  in  London  where  those  methods  were  now  cur- 
rently taught,  and  so  far  as  he  was  concerned  he  was 
only  too  glad  as  President  of  the  Board  of  Education  to 
encourage.  Dr.  Montessori  was  showing  them  that  there 
were  many  things  still  to  be  learned  about  education,  and 
they  in  England  who  were  concerned  with  the  progress 
of  the  public  system  of  education  warmly  welcomed  her 
to  this  country.  They  hoped  that  would  not  be  the  last 
occasion  on  which  they  would  have  the  pleasure  of  meeting 
her  here.  Whenever  she  came  she  would  find  the  warmest 
welcome. 

Mrs.  Moult  said  she  had  been  asked  by  other  students 
of  the  Montessori  Training  Course  to  read  the  following 
statement : 

"We,  who  have  been  privileged  to  study  the  Montessori 


160  APPENDIX  I 

method  of  education  under  Dr.  Montessori  herself, 
and  who  are  fired  with  the  greatest  enthusiasm  and  filled 
with  the  deepest  reverence  before  the  wonders  of  this 
method  as  they  have  unfolded  themselves  to  our  eyes;  we, 
who  have  been  teachers  in  English  elementary  and  other 
schools,  and  in  whose  experience  still  remains  the  disap- 
pointment and  the  distress  of  our  failure  to  achieve  the 
ideals  we  visioned  at  the  beginning  of  our  life's  work;  we, 
who  failed  because,  as  we  now  know,  we  had  deceived 
ourselves  into  belief  that  we  held  all  the  requisite 
materials  to  work  with  and  all  the  training  and  knowledge 
needed  for  the  tremendous  task  before  us;  we  wish 
at  the  conclusion  of  our  course  of  training  under  Dr. 
Montessori  to  offer  her  our  heartfelt  gratitude  for  the 
new  hope,  the  new  confidence,  she  has  inspired  in  us  that 
the  teacher's  work  is  not  only  of  the  noblest  that  man  can 
do,  but  that  it  can  be  achieved  by  us  with  success,  meas- 
ured in  the  true  progress  and  happiness  of  the  children 
and  ourselves.  We  have  learnt,  as  by  a  new  revelation, 
how  to  teach  children  so  that  the  natural  laws  of  child 
life  are  given  the  best  environment  for  development.  We 
have  rediscovered  how  these  laws  of  development  act,  and 
how  they  may  be  hindered.  And,  knowing  how  profound 
the  effect  on  the  future  of  humanity  itself  will  be  the  carry- 
ing out  of  all  we  have  learnt  from  her,  we  are  filled  with 
a  great  responsibility.  We  know,  and  knowing,  we  cannot 
for  the  future  pretend  to  be  ignorant;  knowing,  we  feel 
that  we  cannot  stand  on  one  side,  careless  or  indifferent; 
we  cannot  conscientiously  follow  the  same  paths  as  hitherto 
without  a  new  and  glad  divergence. 

"We  are  now  the  possessors  of  a  new  power  that  we  can 
only  neglect  to  the  injury  of  our  own  souls,  and,  as  we 
believe,  to  the  detriment,  first,  of  the  children  and  ul- 
timately of  the  race,  because  knowledge  in  itself  carries 
a  moral  obligation  to  which  we  dare  not  close  our  eyes. 
Our  responsibility  is  so  acute,  and  felt  so  deeply,  that  we 
are  anxious  to  discharge  it  at  the  first  possible  moment. 
But,  alas !  even  as  we  look  around  us  for  a  place  in  which 
these  ideals,  clamoring  in  our  hearts,  can  be  practiced, 
we  are  checked  and  discouraged.  We  are  realizing  how 


APPENDIX  I  161! 

infinitely  dependent  our  work  must  be  on  outside  forces. 
We  need  schools,  we  need  materials,  and  we  need  other 
teachers  to  join  us;  but  at  the  moment  there  seems  to  be 
nothing  to  justify  the  confidence  that  this  great,  this  re- 
deeming, this  uplifting  work  can  be  commenced  in  our 
land.  We  know  not  where  to  begin,  nor  when,  handi- 
capped as  we  are  by  this  threefold  lack.  Very  humbly, 
but  as  strongly  and  urgently  as  may  only  those  who  are 
fired  by  idealism,  we  ask  to-night  for  a  lead  from  those 
who  have  power,  those  whose  idealism,  we  know,  is  not  less, 
and  is  at  one  with  ours,  so  that  these  hopes  may  not 
be  made  futile  from  sheer  lack  of  opportunity.  We  ask 
that  some  word  of  encouragement  be  given  us  in  our  new 
task;  we  ask  that  we  be  not  kept  long  waiting;  we  ask, 
indeed,  that  our  enthusiasm  for  a  work  which  we  believe 
supreme  be  made  use  of  immediately.  We  are  assured  of 
the  success  of  the  method.  Dr.  Montessori  has  taught  us 
our  part.  With  the  greatest  hope  and  confidence  we  await 
the  opportunity  for  its  expression." 


APPENDIX  II 

THE    MONTESSORI    SOCIETY    IN    ENGLAND 

THE  Montessori  Society  of  the  United  Kingdom  was 
formally  incorporated  in  the  spring  of  1912,  and  its  mem- 
bers approved  by  Dr.  Montessori  as  her  representatives 
in  England.  In  June,  1912,  an  arrangement  was  entered 
into  by  which  Dr.  Montessori  undertook  to  train  a  limited 
number  of  students  sent  out  to  Rome  by  the  Society  from 
time  to  time,  who  might  extend  the  knowledge  of  her 
methods  in  England. 

The  names  of  those  who  formed  the  original  Montessori 
Committee  in  England  are  as  follows : 

Mr.  B.  V.  Melville,  Major  and  Mrs.  Guy  Baring, 
the  Marchioness  of  Bute,  Mrs.  Spender  Clay,  Princess 
Doria,  Mrs.  Arthur  Franklin,  Lady  Isabel  Margesson, 
Mrs.  Meyrick- Jones,  Mrs.  George  Montagu,  Mrs.  Roger 
Plowden,  Viscount  and  Viscountess  St.  Cyres,  Lady 
Dorothy  Wood,  Mr.  D.  T.  Cowan,  The  Rev.  Cecil  Grant, 
Mr.  Bertram  Hawker,  Mr.  Edmond  Holmes,  Mr.  Guy 
Kendall,  Mr.  R.  W.  Kittle,  the  Earl  of  Lytton,  Mr. 
Albert  Mansbridge,  Sir  William  Mather,  Sir  Michael 
Sadler;  with  Major  Baring  as  Hon.  Treasurer,  Mrs. 
Smyth  as  Secretary,  and  the  Marchesa  de  Viti  de  Marco 
as  Representative  of  the  Society  in  Rome. 

Dr.  Montessori,  after  the  international  training  courses 
held  by  her  in  Rome,  which  were  largely  followed  by 
American  students,  went  to  America,  and  later  to  Bar- 
celona, where  the  Catalan  Government  has  founded  and 
financed  for  her  an  institute  for  research.  Dr.  Mon- 
tessori fully  recognizes  the  value  of  such  reforms  as  have 
been  brought  about  by  those  who  have  endeavored 
to  graft  the  new  teaching  on  the  old.  Since,  however, 

162 


APPENDIX  II  163 

she  believes  that  the  old  teaching  must  eventually  dis- 
appear, with  the  superseded  psychology  on  which  it  was 
based,  any  institution  to  which  Dr.  Montessori  lends  her 
name  must  plainly  be  one  that  embodies  the  whole  of  her 
teaching,  and  her  teaching  only.  Dr.  Montessori  has 
consistently  on  this  account  declined  to  approve  any 
schemes  for  training  "Montessori"  teachers  not  under  her 
own  control.  The  present  Montessori  Society  (London)., 
with  a  membership  of  over  1000,  has  represented  those 
who  are  willing  for  the  sake  of  pure  research,  and  apart 
from  questions  of  expediency,  to  sail  for  the  present  at 
least  under  Dr.  Montessori's  own  flag. 

The  work  of  the  Society  consists  in  the  assistance  of  any 
measures  that  Dr.  Montessori  may  set  on  foot  in  this 
country  in  the  establishment  of  classes  and  study-circles, 
and  in  the  giving  of  lectures.  An  office  has  been  opened 
at  11,  Tavistock  Square,  with  a  library,  where  books  can 
be  borrowed  and  where  the  didactic  material  can  be  seen. 
The  Montessori  Society  has  recently  opened  a  bureau  for 
the  registration  of  Montessori  teachers.  At  the  present 
moment  (January,  1919)  there  is  no  model  Montessori 
school  which  can  be  visited,  but  many  of  the  members 
of  the  Society  are  connected  with  Montessori  schools  and 
classes  in  various  parts  of  England.  There  are  also  a 
great  number  of  unauthorized  schools  and  classes,  carried 
on  by  those  who  have  not  studied  under  Dr.  Montes- 
sori, but  who  have  learnt  the  method  so  far  as  is  possible 
from  books. 


APPENDIX  III 

THE  MONTESSORI  SOCIETY 

AT  a  meeting  of  the  Montessori  Society  at  University 
College,  London,  in  January,  1919*  Signorina  Maccheroni 
outlined  the  history  of  Dr.  Montessori's  work  during  the 
years  of  the  war. 

"In  1914,"  she  said,  "we  were  preparing  a  Montessori 
course  in  England,  which  had  to  be  postponed.  Dr. 
Montessori  went  instead  to  America.  In  that  same  year  I 
myself  went  to  Barcelona,  where  I  opened  a  small  school 
of  five  children  on  March  1.  By  October  1  we  had  over 
100  children.  No  sort  of  publicity  had  been  given  to  the 
school,  and  no  prospectuses  had  been  circulated:  the 
parents  of  the  original  children  told  others,  who  brought 
their  children  and  asked  us  to  take  them.  The  parents 
assisted  the  school  better  than  any  business  organizer 
could  have  done.  In  October  of  that  year  the  school  was 
moved  to  larger  premises,  and  at  the  same  time  a  training 
course  for  teachers  was  started.  Many  of  the  leading 
medical  men  of  Barcelona  associated  themselves  with  the 
work  of  the  school.  After  that  Dr.  Montessori  went 
to  California  and  conducted  courses.  At  San  Francisco 
she  arranged  a  model  Montessori  school  in  connection  with 
the  World  Exhibition,  which  attracted  immense  numbers 
of  visitors.  For  this  class,  30  small  children  were 
selected  from  2000  applicants,  and  were  put  under  the 
charge  of  one  teacher.  Some  one  at  Barcelona  said  to 
me,  'Dr.  Montessori  must  have  tremendous  faith  in  her 
own  work  to  do  such  a  thing!'  This  is,  in  fact,  the  case. 
The  arrangements  for  this  model  class  were  as  simple  as  is 
the  case  in  all  Montessori  schools,  and  the  results  followed 
automatically.  The  public  were  greatly  interested  in  the 

164 


APPENDIX  III  165 

enthusiasm  of  the  children,  and  one  entire  day  of  the 
exhibition  was  devoted  to  explanations  of  what  was 
happening. 

"In  spite  of  the  state  of  the  world  during  the  years  of 
the  war  Dr.  Montessori  continually  received  letters  from 
people  all  over  the  world,  telling  her  that  although  they 
could  do  little  for  the  time  being,  they  were  only  awaiting 
an  opportunity  to  act  in  support  of  her  ideas.  The 
Municipality  of  Naples  decided  that  all  the  public  ele- 
mentary schools  of  Naples  should  be  transformed  into 
Montessori  schools,  and  this  work  is  now  being  carried 
out.  A  Montessori  institute  is  also  shortly  to  be  es- 
tablished there.  At  Barcelona,  by  1918,  the  small  school 
had  grown  and  flourished  till  out  of  it  an  institute  had 
evolved  itself.  Other  countries  have  been  waiting  and  are 
still  waiting.  Dr.  Montessori  has  seen  her  work  spreading 
so  rapidly  that  the  interest  taken  in  it  is  almost  an  em- 
barrassment to  her.  'I  too  have  to  work/  she  sometimes 
says,  'and  cannot  talk  all  the  time.' " 

Signorina  Maccheroni  read  an  extract  from  a  paper 
written  by  Dr.  Montessori  in  the  early  days  of  her  work. 
"It  took  some  time,"  wrote  Dr.  Montessori,  "before  I 
could  persuade  myself  that  this  was  not  an  illusion.  At 
every  new  experience  of  the  same  phenomena  I  said  to 
myself,  'I  do  not  yet  believe  it:  next  time  I  will/  For  a 
long  time  I  was  incredulous  before  the  children,  though 
always  astonished  and  moved.  Again  and  again  I  re- 
proached teachers  who  reported  results  to  me  which  I 
could  not  believe  to  be  true,  and  the  teachers  said  to  me 
that  indeed  they  could  scarcely  believe  them  themselves. 
The  children  appeared  to  be  inspired  by  the  angels.  One 
day  at  last,  standing  before  the  children,  I  said  within 
myself :  'Who  are  you  then  ?  Have  I  here  met  the  children 
who  were  in  the  arms  of  Christ?' " 

Dr.  Crichton  Miller,  who  translated  Signorina  Montes- 
sori's  address  sentence  by  sentence,  also  gave  an  address, 
in  which  he  said  that  he  was  interested  in  this  move- 
ment as  a  clinical  psychologist  who  was  daily  and  hourly 
brought  in  contact  with  social  deficiency,  personal  un- 
happiness,  suffering  of  all  kinds,  most  of  which  could  be 


166  APPENDIX  III 

traced  back  to  morbid  emotional  development  in  child- 
hood. The  reason  why  the  Montessori  method  had  such  a 
tremendous  future  before  it  was  that  it  was  the  key  to  the 
normal,  wholesome,  and  sane  emotional  development  of  the 
child.  What  the  clinical  psychologist  recognized  as  a 
tragedy  at  the  one  end  was  foreseen  and  averted  at  the 
other  end  by  this  new  system  of  education. 

The  way  in  which  we  have  brought  up  small  children 
had  been  artificial  in  the  extreme.  The  Montessori  child, 
surrounded  with  innumerable  different  possibilities  for  ac- 
tivity, is  able  to  make  his  choice  of  action  in  the  same 
way  that  is  conceded  to  energetic  grown-up  people  who 
wish  to  do  fruitful  work.  The  Froebelians,  on  the  other 
hand,  had  always  said:  "This  is  what  you  must  do,  and 
we  will  make  it  as  interesting  as  possible  for  you." 
Froebel's  method,  moreover,  had  been  based  on  a  subtle 
affective  influence  in  the  way  of  suggestion  from  the 
teacher,  personal  inspiration,  etc.  Dr.  Montessori  sought 
to  eliminate  this  affective  element  from  the  story  of  the 
thought-life.  She  had  established  in  her  schools  phe- 
nomena which  recurred  with  the  automatic  regularity  of 
a  natural  law,  and  had  based  her  work  on  observation  of 
the  child's  attitude  during  the  performance  of  those  tasks 
in  which  he  was  able  to  lose  himself  and  become  wholly 
interested.  This  phenomenon  was  so  remarkable  that  it  has 
a  specific  value.  It  was  not  the  ordinary  interest  of 
the  child  ordinarily  taught.  The  fundamentally  sound 
basis  of  the  Montessori  method  was  the  large  choice 
of  interests  and  the  freedom  which  permit  the  appearance 
of  this  phenomenon.  Under  other  methods  a  large  propor- 
tion of  the  children  never  were  really  interested. 

The  essential  feature  of  the  Montessori  method  was  the 
appearance  of  this  phenomenon,  which  Dr.  Montessori  had 
named  "il  gran  lavoro."  At  an  astonishingly  early  age 
by  this  means  the  child  "realized  itself,"  whereas  the 
average  child  often  did  not  realize  itself  at  all  till  it  had 
left  school,  and  possibly  university  too. 

Those  who  talked  loosely  about  discipline  often  did  not 
realize  that  the  child  brought  up  in  strict  discipline  was 
just  as  much  in  an  artificial  state  of  emotivity  as  the  child 


APPENDIX  III  167 

who  had  been  "spoilt."  The  emotional  element  in  the 
one  case  was  hostile  and  in  the  other  apparently  friendly, 
but  artificial  emotion  was  still  there.  Dr.  Montessori 
gives  us  the  possibility  of  allowing  the  child  to  grow 
up  without  interference  from  the  emotional  point  of  view. 
We  must  remember  that  we  have  always  been  dealing  with 
the  ante-social  child.  The  Montessori  child  is  the  social 
child,  and  the  whole  situation  is  altered.  The  great 
problem  of  the  clinical  psychologist  has  been  how  to 
provide  for  the  spontaneous  development  of  emotion. 
Outbursts  of  spontaneous  affection  of  the  children  always 
come  after  the  phenomena  of  self-realization.  That  spon- 
taneous emotion,  coming  from  within  the  child,  is  totally 
different  to  the  cooped-up  hot-house  emotions  we  have 
been  accustomed  to  foster. 

Long  before  the  development  of  analytical  psychology, 
medicine  was  occupied  with  the  problems  of  the  intro- 
version and  entroversion,  the  miseries  of  persons  who  suf- 
fer from  lack  of  expression  or  from  a  morbid  facility  of 
expression.  The  origins  of  these  things,  which  we  did  not 
understand,  Dr.  Montessori  has  now  explained  to  us  in  a 
way  that  is  both  damning  and  final. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

WORKS  BY  DR.  MONTESSORI 

The  Montessori  Method  (Stokes).     1912. 
Pedagogical  Anthropology    (Stokes).     1913. 
Dr.  Montessori' s  Own  Handbook  (Stokes).     1914. 
The  Advanced  Montessori  Method: — 

Vol.  1.    Spontaneous  Activity  in  Education   (Stokes).     1917. 

Vol.  2.     The  Montessori  Elementary  Material  (Stokes).    1917. 

WORKS  BY  OTHER  AUTHORS 

The  Montessori  System.    By  Theodate  L.  Smith  (Harper).    1912. 

A  Montessori  Mother.    By  Dorothy  Canfield  Fisher  (Holt).    1912. 

The  Montessori  Manual.  By  Dorothy  Canfield  Fisher  (Richard- 
son). 1913. 

The  Montessori  Method  and  the  American  School.  By  Florence 
Elizabeth  Ward  (Macmillan).  1913. 

A  Guide  to  the  Montessori  Method.  By  EHen  Yale  Stevens 
(Stokes).  1913. 

Montessori  Method.  By  S.  A.  Morgan  (Ontario  Department  of 
Education,  Toronto).  1913. 

From  Locke  to  Montessori.    By  William  Boyed  (Holt).     1914. 

Montessori  System  Examined.  By  W.  H.  Kilpatrick  (Houghton). 
1914. 

Montessori  Schools  as  Seen  in  the  Early  Summer  of  1913.  By 
Jessie  White  (Oxford).  1914. 

Children's  Play  and  Its  Place  in  Education.  By  W.  Wood 
(Duffield).  1914. 

The  Montessori  Principles  and  Practice.  By  E.  P.  Culverwell 
(John  Martin  House).  1914. 

The  Path  to  Freedom  in  the  School.  By  N.  MacMunn  (Mac- 
millan). 1914. 

Kindergarten  and  the  Montessori  Method.  By  M.  Mac  Laer 
(R.  G.  Badger).  1915. 

Montessori  Children.     By  Caroline  Sherwin  Bailey  (Holt).     1915. 

Proceedings  of  the  National  Educational  Association  of  America. 
1915. 

The  Montessori  Educational  Material  is  manufactured  in  Amer- 
ica by  The  House  of  Childhood,  Inc.,  103  West  14th  St.,  New 
York  City. 

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